Rhea Barnett has lost her mother but, despite a healthy period of grieving with her family, is unable to resolve her feelings. So she travels to India seeking spiritual plurality. There she meets an Australian who is unlike any male she has met before. But it is not long before Rhea uncovers in Reiner the same insecurities as the English males of her past. In the end she leaves him, stoned and dancing around a self-immolating backpacker on a beach in Southern India, and travels on to join her best friend Belinda in Australia. There Rhea completes a novel she has begun to find during her travels through India, in which a young member of the resistance in the Third World War, Michael teams up with the punk Bozzo and heroin addict Sheena to plan a revelation to the world of a multinational corporate plot in collusion with global government. In the process, the hapless Michael discovers that the story he thought he was in is about as far from the centre of the narrative as he could have imagined.