Kelly Anders, financially successful writer of best-selling romantic fiction, lives a privileged but sterile existence in a Manhattan penthouse. Pushed into a book tour of Britain by her publisher, Kelly dreads a politically orchestrated meeting with Rachel Sommerset, the acclaimed Nobel Prize‒winning novelist, her generation's Tolstoy. The encounter, while leading to a surprising friendship between the two women, dredges up the ghosts of Kelly's past--her unacknowledged youth with a different name in the impoverished inner city and her ambivalent feelings toward her husband, Gerald, now hidden away in her penthouse in a permanent coma, the fallout of an ugly kidnapping in Argentina of himself, the mining corporation head he worked for, along with the man's consort, Teresa, and Jake, a renowned photographer. Their lives changed forever by their brutal captors, Jake and Teresa, in their struggle to right themselves, find their way together in the world, while unified with them through their shared experience and strengthened by the bond she'd built with Rachel, Kelly begins to reassess her career and her life in an ultimate quest for redemption.