Jerusalem, 1920: civic advisor and architect Charles Ashton has an ambitious (and crazy) project to redesign the Holy City by importing English parks to the desert and knocking down Ottoman minarets. He employs William Harrington, a British pilot, to take aerial photographs of the city and surrounding desert.
At this time, Palestine, under British administration, is a surprisingly peaceful mix of British colonials, exiled Armenians, and Greek, Arab, and Jewish officials rubbing elbows, but there are simmers of trouble ahead.
Eleanora, the young English wife of a famous Jerusalem photographer, meets and falls for Harrington, threatening her marriage, particularly when William discovers that Eleanora’s husband is part of an underground nationalist group intent on removing the British.
Years later, in 1937, Ashton’s daughter Prue, an artist who has escaped the pressures of the London art world and a damaging marriage to live a reclusive life in Sussex by the Sea, is paid a visit by Harrington. What he reveals unravels her world, and she must follow the threads that lead her back to secrets long-ago buried in Jerusalem.
