

In the 1960s, Lilly, a British girl, is raised as a Muslim at a Sufi shrine in Morocco after being abandoned there by her parents. As a young woman in the early 1970s, she is sent to Harar, Ethiopia, where she falls in love with a doctor named Aziz, but they are separated when the Ethiopian Civil War begins.[3] Lilly escapes as a refugee to England. There she befriends Amina, a traumatized fellow refugee who moves in with her. Lilly works as a nurse's aide at a hospital, where a kind doctor named Robin befriends her, but she resists his romantic interest as she hopes to be reunited with Aziz.