Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than
any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world--a life
of education, work, and comfort--implodes when their country is engulfed
in war, and the Taliban rises to power.
Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist
regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children,
Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and
reach her sister's family in England. With forged papers and help from
kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous
crossing into Iran under cover of darkness. Exhausted and brokenhearted
but undefeated, Fereiba manages to smuggle them as far as Greece. But in
a busy market square, their fate takes a frightening turn when her
teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family.
Faced with an impossible choice, Fereiba pushes on with her daughter and
baby, while Saleem falls into the shadowy underground network of
undocumented Afghans who haunt the streets of Europe's capitals. Across
the continent Fereiba and Saleem struggle to reunite, and ultimately
find a place where they can begin to reconstruct their lives.
