From the songs of Arab diva Umm Khultum on the banks of the Tigris to the strains of a young boy playing the violin for his mother in Melbourne, to the swing jazz of the nightclubs and cabarets of 1940s Baghdad, a fisherman playing a flute on the banks of the Mekong, and Paganini in the borderlands of eastern Poland…

Music weaves its way through each of these spellbinding stories. Each tale, each fragment of music, leads to Amal, the woman who saved her life by clinging to a corpse for twenty hours alone in the sea. Arnold Zable takes the reader on an intimate journey into the lives of people he met on travels over the last forty years.

These are tales aching to be told. Tales of hardship, of yearning and of celebration. Tales that span the globe, and bring us back to Melbourne to the powerful and heartbreaking story of Amal—her flight from Baghdad, her fears boarding the unseaworthy SIEV X, her survival when it went down, and her desire to have her story told.