In 1995, thirty-six-year-old loner Will, historical scholar and product of a vanishing upper crust British stoicism, arrives in New Delhi. Smarting from the collapse of his academic dreams, he is drawn there by an inexplicable urgency, but finds little fulfilment in his well-paying telecommunications job, the narrow expat community and his tenuous relationship. One night, propelled by the sensory splendour of the monsoon, he encounters young, enigmatic Leela, whose fateful appearance in his world catalyses a storm of passion and devastation that will alter it forever. Twenty-three years later, Aria sets foot on the soil of her birth for the first time, on a quest to find the mother whom she believed to be dead. Estranged from her convalescing father, her journey leads her to unravel the mysteries of her parents’ story and her mother’s life, from her childhood in an orphanage to a consuming but doomed love affair and, finally, to the remote shores of asceticism, severing all ties with the world. As she searches for answers and a sense of belonging, Aria stumbles upon a new world of ancient tradition—and the explosive secret that torpedoed her father’s life, the reverberations of which will be cataclysmic for her own.
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