Opening dramatically with the horrors of the 2005 London bombings, this is the profoundly moving story of a country on the brink of civil war & a child`s struggle to come to terms with loss. London. On a bright July morning a series of bombs brings the capital to a halt. Simon Swann, a medic from one of the large teaching hospitals, is searching frantically amongst the chaos & the rubble. All around police sirens & ambulances are screaming but Simon does not hear. He is out of breath because he has been running, & he is distraught. But who is he looking for? To find out we have first to go back thirty years to a small island in the Indian Ocean where a little girl named Alice Fonseka is learning to ride a bicycle on the beach. The island is Sri Lanka, & its community is on the brink of civil war. Alice`s life is about to change forever. Soon she will have to leave for Engl&, abandoning her beloved grandfather, & accompanied by her mother Sita, a woman broken by a series of terrible events. In London, Alice grows into womanhood. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she has a son. Slowly she fulfils her grandfather`s prophecy & becomes an artist. Eventually she finds true love. But London in the twenty-first century is a mass of migration & suspicion. The war on terror has begun & everyone, even Simon Swann, middle class, rational, medic that he is, will be caught up in this war in the most unexpected & terrible way.