It is September 2009 Ramadan & the eve of Afghanistans first democratic elections when young American Malone pilot for an aid airline does Fatima Hamza the favour of flying her out of Kabul to Bamiyan while his surgeon wife Kim heads south to Kandahar. The beguiling Oxford-educated Pashtun Fatima has left Pakistan to rediscover the country she comes from she tells him to retrace the places that were important to her spy-chief father ex-military man & writer with a disturbing gift of prophecy. For both Kim & Malone the foray into that dangerous territory is to become a prolonged adventure their former lives receding as they lose touch with one another & enter the world of the enemy. Each is to witness the horror of an air raid & each is to come face-to-face with the Taliban. They will glimpse hell but paradise too & be changed. In this powerful novel Paul Pickering gives a human face to the conflict in Afghanistan capturing the magical quality of a land & its people.