Andalucia, 1938 — towards the end of the Spanish Civil War a group of Republican soldiers kidnap Professor Pinzon and his grandson and hold them hostage in St Jaime's Cathedral together with a group of townspeople. Searching the Cathedral, they discover a crypt leading into a secret space, a medieval mosque directly underneath them, undisturbed for hundreds of years. The mosque holds a book, written in the eleventh century by Samuel the Jew. Reading it to his grandson, the Professor realises that Samuel's tale — a story of lifelong friendship, love, and religious warring between Christians, Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain — has anticipated many of the events in the ideologically torn world of the mid-twentieth century. And in its description of the building of the mosque, Samuel's tale may also hold the secret to freedom for the hostages...

Beautiful, headstrong and unconventional, Catherine Cabot is twenty years old when she arrives in China. Against an uneasy political background a bittersweet, triangular love affair develops between Catherine and Edmund and George Airton. And all the while, she is trying to uncover the truth of her past, unaware of the danger this might pose to her. Who is Henry Manners, the mysterious man who once wrote to her mother, and who she knows now lives in China? Running in parallel is the extraordinary story of Yu-Fu-kuei, a Chinese revolutionary working as a Communist spy. She and Catherine met when they were at Oxford immediately after the Great War, and the friendship is deep and permanent. As the Japanese mass themselves on the borders, waiting for an excuse to invade, Catherine, ignorant of a history steeped in hatred, unwittingly becomes the perfect tool to settle the scores of two men who will stop at nothing to wreak their revenge. And Yu-Fu-kuei discovers that love might be the strongest weapon that any warrior has.