A stirring story of love, loss and the distance between three generations of one family. A stirring story of love, loss and the distance between three generations of one family. Fragility and forgetfulness have left 82-year-old Iris vulnerable and in the care of her manservant, Mamdooh. Stiflingly quiet and claustrophobic, Iris's house in old Cairo is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of her troubled and wilful granddaughter, Ruby. Labouring under a fraught relationship with her family, Ruby has run away from England to seek solace with the grandmother she hasn't seen for many years. An unlikely bond arises as the two women open themselves up to one another. Ruby helps Iris document her deteriorating memories of the glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo of World War Two, a time when she lost her heart to her one true love - the enigmatic Captain Xan Molyneux - and then lost him to the ravages of the war. This early devastation of Iris's heart shapes her life as well as that of her daughter and her granddaughter. It is this need to recover Iris's past and solidify Ruby's present that leads the two women into terrible danger in the Egyptian desert. spanning three generations of one family.