Sudan, 1985. Mara Voskic, a young Yugoslavian journalist, arrives in Khartoum to cover the preparations for the upcoming elections. She also anticipates seeing again some friends she had met there a couple of years earlier, and especially Nyamila Deng, a young Dinka woman with whom she had shared an adventurous journey through South Sudan in 1983, at the beginning of a devastating civil war. When Mara reaches her friends' address, however, she finds their house deserted. In search of her friends, she comes across a fellow journalist, Andrew Dawson, who eventually helps her locate Nyamila. But if the relationship with Andrew deepens into more than a simple friendship, meeting Nyamila again will prove emotionally traumatic, for Mara: the beautiful, enigmatic Nyamila isn't any longer - and maybe has never been - the person Mara thought she knew. And Andrew... Who is Andrew, in reality? In the microcosm of the Khartoum of the '80s, nothing and nobody seem to be what they appear.