In a Massachusetts mill town in the early 1960s, an elderly teacher of languages runs her car off the road one afternoon, and is killed. A refugee from wartime Germany and Spain, disciplined, exacting Anna Aylmer is a mystery to her neighbors and colleagues. For her prize pupils, four young men on the cusp of gay manhood, the shock waves of her death ripple forward through the remainder of their lives. From Boston in the 1970s to a Caribbean island where the four are reunited in the AIDS-ravaged 1980s, The Old World lays the bones of a troubled past at the doorstep of the present.