In 1979, Thekla Clark and her husband John, Americans living in Tuscany, decide to "adopt" an ethnic Chinese refugee family from Vietnam. Less than a year later, the Clarks offer a home to the four surviving members of a Cambodian family - the rest of whom had perished under the Khmer Rouge.

After their arrival in Italy, the members of both families, young and old, struggle with living in an unfamiliar culture and making sense of their grief-filled pasts. As they learn to communicate in Italian and English, their personal histories unfold.

They share their individual sagas - of learning to barter in the squalid refugee camps, of being force-marched from their homes by the Khmer Rouge, of enduring the "collective madness" of the children's work camps - as well as stories of life before the war. Out of this disparate, multicultural group, living in a large, twelfth-century house in the Tuscan countryside, an amazing community emerges. Children in Exile is Thekla Clark's story of this remarkable cross-cultural family.