Overview

The story is told in real time through the interwoven experiences of four characters. On the Kapiti Coast, the lives of three people intersect as they travel on the morning commuter train to Wellington. Sally is a 17-year-old schoolgirl, stepping tentatively into womanhood. Brendan is middle-aged, Irish, a widower, trying to move on from the death of his wife some years before. Tamas is a Hungarian immigrant, struggling to lay the foundations of a new life in New Zealand for his wife and son. Farida, a young Muslim woman, acts as a translator for the security services in Dunedin. While she works, she catches ambiguous glimpses of a terrorist plot that threatens to engulf them all. As the characters pursue their dreams and face up to their everyday fears, the reader watches them grapple with love and loss and the tangles of relationships, and inevitably dreads their impending fate.