When Mia was a child, she told Asher that the dreamcloth took away her nightmares. This is a stirring work of great tenderness and courage. It is 1994 when Mia finally returns home, ambivalent, afraid of what she will find. A strong-willed journalist embroiled for the last decade in ravaged conflict zones; she arrives in Johannesburg to confront the secrets that have plagued her family for three generations. And, hidden in her bra, close to her heart, is the dreamcloth. When Mia finally retrieved the small patchwork cloth of beads and lace from Asher, the man she blames for her father's death a decade ago, she unwittingly regained the only clue to an expansive tale of lost love and anguish. The cloth, woven in the 1920s by a seamstress in a grim shtetl in Lithuania, veils the mystery of a forbidden love affair of Mia's paternal grandmother, Maya, as she fled anti-Semitic Europe and will lead Mia to a shattering truth. In Mia's search to reconnect with the places and people she left behind, she journeys through her childhood, through her relationships with her beloved father, Issey, her nanny, Sarafina, and best friend, Grace.
But, the first person she will have to face is her distant mother, Fran obsessed with the roses in her perfectly manicured, northern suburbs garden. Mia comes to terms with what has passed and been lost, she must decide: will she, like her nomadic ancestors, be a gypsy forever, or will she stay in South Africa? This is a sprawling and controversial epic that weaves together the present, past and distant past.