When German bombs begin to fall on London in 1940, Millie and Reginald Thompson decide to take a difficult step: they send their eleven-year-old daughter Beatrice overseas to the safety of America. There she will have to live with someone else's family until the war ends. Frightened, angry at her parents, lonely and lost, Bea arrives in a country so different from the grim wartime London. Mr. and Mrs. Gee, as well as their sons William and Gerald, welcome the Englishwoman, and soon she becomes part of this new world, part of a happy family. Time passes, the war will not subside, and it already seems to Bea that there is nothing more natural than a quiet, calm life here, in a large and cozy house, and the summer months full of fun on a tiny island. Gloomy London and eternally tired parents begin to seem something distant to her, but still Bea does not want to forget her childhood, her roots. And she returns home, but the memory of her American family is forever in Bea's heart, and it is these memories that guide her through life. “And then the sea” is a novel full of sun and fog, acute happiness and painful pain, forgiveness and understanding, loss and love.