Liz Headleand is one of Londons best-known and most prominent psychiatrists. One day she arrives at work to find a mysterious package, postmarked from Cambodia. Inside, hidden amongst scraps of paper, ancient drawings, and old postcards, she discovers pieces of human finger bones. Shocked but intrigued, she realizes the papers belong to her old friend, Stephen Cox, a playwright who moved to Cambodia to work on a script about the Khmer Rouge. Convinced Stephen is trying to send her some sort of message, Liz follows the clues in the box to the jungles of Cambodia, risking her life to find her friend. In this thrilling new adventure with the heroine of The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity, Margaret Drabble takes us far from the civilized, familiar streets of London, painting an "urgent, brilliant" (The Boston Globe) portrait of the tumultuous, terror-ridden landscape of Cambodia in the late twentieth century.