Suzanne Joinson Libri

It is 1923 and Evangeline English, keen lady cyclist, arrives with her sister Lizzie and their zealous leader Millicent at the ancient city of Kashgar to establish a mission. As they encounter resistance and calamity, Eva commences work on her Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar...In present-day London, Frieda opens her door to find a man sleeping on the landing. Tayeb, a Yemeni refugee, has arrived in Frieda's life just as she learns that she is next-of-kin to a stranger, a woman whose abandoned flat contains many surprises. The two wanderers embark on a journey that is as great, and as unexpected, as Eva's.

"In 1920s Jerusalem, civic advisor and architect Charles Ashton has an ambitious project to redesign the Holy City by importing English parks to the desert and knocking down Ottoman minarets. He employs William Harrington, a British pilot, to take aerial photographs of the city and surrounding desert. At this time, Palestine, under British administration, is a surprisingly peaceful mix of characters; British colonials, exiled Armenians, and Greek, Arab, and Jewish officials rub elbows, but tensions are growing and there are simmers of trouble ahead. Eleanora, the young English wife of a famous Jerusalem photographer, meets and falls for William Harrington, threatening her marriage, particularly when William discovers that Eleanora's husband is part of an underground nationalist group intent on removing the British. Years later, in 1937, Ashton's daughter Prue is an artist living a reclusive life in Shoreham, Sussex with her son, having escaped the pressures of the London art world in the aftermath of the Surrealist exhibitions and a damaging marriage. Harrington arrives and what he reveals unravels her world, and she must follow the threads that lead her back to secrets long-ago buried in Jerusalem."-- Author's website