Kristjana flees twenty-first-century London in order to avoid a decision about her future. While attending a dying man in a Jerusalem hospital, she escapes into another woman s past and discovers there the courage to embrace her own destiny. Through his vivid storytelling, Kristjana s cancer patient Leo Hampton recounts his mother s life her upbringing in colonial Malta, her education in Edwardian England, and her service as a volunteer nurse during World War I. Captivated by the story of her life, Kristjana is pulled into the agonies and the ecstasies of Liljana Hampton, which almost seem more real to her than those of her own life.Through her vicarious experience of another woman s personal history, Kristjana discovers the secret of fearlessly moving forward. With her passionate and colorful prose, award-winning author Fiorella De Maria seamlessly weaves back and forth between the past and the future.