In November 1989, an Indian couple are discovered murdered in a small town in upstate New York. They lie together as though just disengaged from a long embrace. Yet their murder has been two centuries in the making.

County Sligo, Ireland, 1843. Seventeen-year-old Brendan McCarthaigh and his best friend Padraig have everything ahead of them. Quiet Brendan is in love with books and headstrong, spirited Padraig is madly in love with black-haired Brigid. But when the sanctimonious Father Conlon discovers Padraig and Brigid's clandestine affair, he sets in motion a chain of unforeseeable, irrevocable events that will propel one to North America and the other to Bengal.

Weaving together private histories and real events, and taking us on a journey across the globe - Kalyan Ray has crafted a sweeping, epic, multigenerational saga spanning two centuries. A rich, compelling tale of home and exile, identity and hybridity, it is also a story of oppression, friendship and compassion, and the few intimate degrees of separation that lie between love and murder.

Kalyan Ray's family was uprooted from the Ganges Delta (now Bangladesh) through a combination of natural disasters, political upheaval, and poverty. He grew up in Calcutta, was educated in India and the US, and now lives in both countries. He is the author of the novel Eastwords (published in India) and several books of translations of contemporary Indian poetry into English, including City of Memories which has a preface by Allen Ginsberg.