Nora Reardon and her Turkish agent, Muharrem El Habashy, travel Turkey's rock-strewn rural roads to purchase rugs. Not just any rugs. Her eyes are searching for colors leeched from desert beetles, patterns that flow onto the loom from ancient memories to calloused fingers, fibers washed in the streams and dried in the sun - the kind of Oriental rugs preferred by her discriminating East Coast clients. Nora is driven by a passion for the rugs and a need to be independent of her con- servative, Lebanese brothers who, since her husband's death, insist her place is in Philadelphia with her five-year-old son, Skipper. That's not what Nora wants. She struggles with her business and a desperate desire to bond with her son. When she meets Carlos Ghazerian, an Ankara-based broker of antique Oriental rugs, he guides Nora to financial success, until she is thrown into a Turkish prison and her son spirals into a suicidal depression.