A story of friendship, loyalty and dispossession In February 2000, Richard Zimler went to Australia for the Perth Writers' Festival. While he was there, he met a talented dancer from a Brazilian mime and dance troupe. The tragic step she would take the next day would change his life forever, and launch him into an obsessive, three-year investigation of her past. He discovers a childhood lived at a time of peaceful tolerance between neighbouring Arabs and Jews in the old districts of Haifa. As this tranquillity becomes fragile, and despite their ethnic and religious differences, two particular girls - one Palestinian one Israeli - forge a bond of sisterhood strong enough to last a lifetime. Zimler's investigations lead him deeper and deeper into a web of illusions, cruelty and deceit - and finally to September 11, 2001, when the tragedy he witnessed in Perth is set in the starkest of political contexts.
