When Yasmin leaves the Canadian city in which she has lived for decades to return her mother's ashes to the island of her birth, she does so purely out of a sense of duty and to turn her back for a while on her splintering marriage. But as she arrives in the Caribbean and meets her uncle and aunt, the boy Ash who lives with them and the silent, passionate maid Amina, the past she has so long ignored begins to acquire a surprising and unsettling reality.
Yasmin eventually learns more about herself than she ever suspected there was to know - but first she must learn something of the lost world of her parents, of their early years in London and dreams of independence that led to violence and to murder, and the intense desire to forget that drove her mother to Canada.
