Beatrice Kizza is a refugee in flight from her homeland; Howard Pink is a blustering self-made millionaire; Carol Hetherington, recently widowed, is living the quiet life in Wandsworth and Esme Reade is a journalist learning to muck-rake in pursuit of the elusive scoop. Four strangers, they are each inhabitants of the same city - the capital - where the gulf between those who have too much and those who will never have enough is impossibly vast. But when an inexcusable act shatters the boundaries between their worlds, they discover that the city has connected them in ways they could never have imagined.