Jerusalem, 1947: a young Israeli girl loses her big sister. Jaffa, 1948: a young Palestinian boy loses his two best friends. Dover, 1963: a young Englishman falls in love with a language. Forty years on, in Malibu, California, these three lives intersect, when former real estate developer David Finkelstein receives an unexpected invitation to a Jewish fundraiser that is destined to turn his life upside-down, embroiling him in not one, but two atrocities so monstrous they threaten to send the entire Middle East up in flames. Finkelstein's struggle to prevent these appalling acts soon puts his own family in mortal danger as the world's most ruthless Palestinian terrorist closes in on his Israeli wife, Hannah. Caught in the tragic clash between two peoples, so similar they are almost mirror images of each another, David races from Malibu to London, to Beirut, to Jaffa, to Baalbek, as he is sucked ever deeper into the maelstrom of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where nothing and nobody can be taken for granted.