Maybe there really had been angels then - anything could be true of the past, I thought.

In inter-War London, a young wife helps her new husband in their silverware shop. Bea's days are punctuated by customers who, more often than not, come to look but never buy - and the visitations of an angel who flits at the edge of her sight, each appearance carefully logged in the pages of a scarlet journal.

In a time rather like now, Kay works temp jobs and spends nights dancing and arguing politics. Mysterious travellers watch her silently on the tube and in her local supermarket. And at her grandmother's house Kay finds a strange but careful record of an angel's visits.

A hundred years hence, outsiders have banded together to live off-grid, trying to evade the surveillance of a corrupt government, and envision utopia on the fringes of a city wracked by oppression and climate change. Ess discovers she has been carefully chosen for a virgin mission, a journey into the past to help save the present, guided only by a well-thumbed red notebook...