Sweetness in the Belly

In Thatcher's London, Lilly, a white Muslim nurse, struggles in a state of invisible exile. As refugees from Ethiopia gradually fill the flats of the housing estate where she lives, Lilly tentatively begins to share with them her longing for the home she once had there and her heartbreaking search for her missing lover. Back in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, the young Lilly, born in the 1950s to British parents, orphaned and full of religious conviction, finds herself living in the city of Harar. She is drawn to the idealistic young doctor, Aziz, himself an outsider in the community. But then convulsions of a new revolutionary order separate them, sending Lilly to an England she has never seen, while Aziz disappears.