The book’s main narrator, Amal, is a middle-aged Egyptian woman who has become increasingly sad and isolated after the end of her marriage and the dispersal of her family. She feels both intense loyalty to her home country and a sort of homesickness for it, even as she lives in it: so much has changed over the course of her life that she feels detached even from the relative familiarity of Cairo.

When Isabel arrives in Cairo with a trunk of heirlooms that reveals a strange connection between her and Amal, Amal becomes obsessed with tracing the story of their shared ancestors. Her research reveals her vivid imagination and her identification with the people of the past: she is not only deeply invested in these stories but imagines them in intense physical detail. Her obsession with filling in the gaps of these stories leads her toward many new forms of connection. She not only develops a relationship with Isabel, but with their shared familial dead—and this connection with the dead begins to pull her inexorably back into her own life.