"On a bright morning in July, a series of bombs brings London to a halt. Simon Swann, a doctor from one of the large teaching hospitals, searches frantically amongst the chaos and the rubble... But who is he looking for? Thirty years earlier on a small island in the Indian Ocean a little girl named Alice Fonseka is learning to ride a bicycle on the beach. The island is Sri Lanka and it is a nation on the brink of civil war... Soon she will leave for England, abandoning her beloved grandfather, and accompanied by her mother Sita... In London, Alice grows into womanhood. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she has a son, and eventually she finds true love. But London in the twenty first century is a mass of migration and suspicion. The war on terror has begun and everyone, even Simon Swann, middle class liberal that he is, will be caught up in this war in the most unexpected and terrible way."--Publisher description.