Yasmeen Khalil is beautiful and charming. She is also unpredictable enigmatic funny and tragic. One day she vanishes leaving behind a heartbroken husband and a desolate daughter. Irenie refuses to accept that Yasmeen is gone; she haunts the house with the scents and sounds of her dazzling mother in an effort to maintain the illusion of her presence.
Five years after her mother's disappearance Irenie discovers a box of letters beautiful intimate love letters which reveal a different Yasmeen a woman who all her life was in love with a man named Ahmed. Why did the two never get together? What really happened to Yasmeen? On a quest for answers that she suspects her father James has long suppressed she travels to Islamabad where she uncovers a trove of secrets for which she may not be ready. Over the course of a summer father and daughter find that they must help each other move out of Yasmeen's shadow and forge their own stories.
Simultaneously shattering and uplifting this is a sophisticated debut about obsessive love family ties and a desperate search for closure.