Mia is in Bosnia as a journalist when she is summoned by Asher, the man she blames for her father’s death. In his dying moments, Asher returns the dreamcloth to her, a patchwork of beads and lace he stole when she was just a child.
The cloth, woven by a seamstress in a grim shtetl in Lithuania, holds the mystery of a forbidden love affair of Mia’s grandmother Maya, as she fled the anti-Semitism of Europe in the 1920’s.
Mia returns to her homeland South Africa, on the eve of the first democratic elections where she grapples to make sense of the injustices, absences and hauntings of her childhood. What happened to her artist father Issey, her nanny Sarafina, and her best friend Grace? The dreamcloth with its ‘glimmer of blue silk, a moon of filigree lace and woven cobblestones of amber,’ holds the answers to all that has been lost.
Fedler weaves together the present, past and distant past in a stirring epic of family secrets handed down from generation to generation, and ghosts that will not let go of the living.