The Booker Prize-winning author of Moon Tiger presents "a fluent, funny, ultimately moving romance" (New York Times Book Review) set in North Africa, that follows the fate of two star-crossed lovers and the dramatic events that shape their destinies.
A palaeontologist by choice--and perhaps due to the accidental discovery of a fossil fragment on the north coast of England when he was six years old--Howard Beamish is flying to Nairobi on a professional mission when his plane is forced to land in an imaginary country called Callimbia. On assignment to write a travel piece for Sunday magazine, journalist Lucy Faulkner is on the same flight. What happens to Howard and Lucy in Callimbia is one of those accidents that determine fate, that can bring love and take away joy, that reveal to us the precariousness of our existence and the trajectory of our lives.