1947 Evie, her husband and five-year-old son have just arrived in the Indian village of Masurlu. Her husband Martin must witness the historic British withdrawal from India and the partition of the country, while Evie finds herself establishing a new life in an old colonial bungalow and trying to mend the cracks that have formed in their marriage. But from the very beginning, everything goes completely differently than Evie imagined. India is too exotic, Martin is moving away more and more, and Evie spends whole days with her little son Billy. Languishing with melancholy, Evie cleans up the house and unexpectedly discovers a hiding place, and in it is a bunch of letters. Intrigued, Evie deciphers the ornate Victorian handwriting and soon finds herself at the mercy of the story of the old house's former inhabitants, two young English girls who lived here in almost complete isolation about a hundred years ago. Looks like there's some kind of secret hidden here. Evie tries to unravel the mystery, and the deeper she dives into someone else's past, the better she understands her own present. In this panoramic novel, personal stories are intertwined with the tragic events of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries.