Frustrated by country life and eager for adventure and excitement, seventeen-year-old Tom Button moves to the city to study.

Once there, and living in a rundown apartment block called Cairo, he is befriended by the eccentric musician Max Cheever, his beautiful wife Sally, and their close-knit circle of painters and poets. As Tom falls under the sway of his charismatic older friends, he enters a bohemian world of parties and gallery openings. Soon, however, he is caught up in more sinister events involving deception and betrayal, not to mention one of the greatest unsolved art heists of the twentieth century: the infamous theft of Picasso's Weeping Woman.

Set among the demimonde - where nothing and nobody is as they seem - Cairo is a novel about growing up, the perils of first love, and finding one's true place in the world.