Isabel, a young woman in flight from the ravages of the Great War, throws herself headlong into a passionate and dangerous liaison with Sam, an Indian doctor, and Oxford graduate - but their devotion to one another takes them across the length and breadth of India and to the brink of disaster. This powerful and erotic love story combines the urgent and contemporary themes of colonial exploitation, race and sexuality, and compellingly explores the many forms of partition - secular and religious - that infect and endanger the modern world.