On his way to meet his son for the first time, hardened former war correspondent Henry Skinner is hit by a car after rescuing a child from drowning. He is rushed to hospital where he floats, comatose, between dreams, reliving the fairytales of his childhood and the secrets that made him run away in the first place.

His son, Sam, a thirteen-year old synesthete with an IQ of 144, waits at his father’s bedside. There he meets Eddie Tomlin, a woman forced to confront her love for Henri after all these years, and twelve-year old Madelyn Zeidler, another coma patient and the sole survivor of an accident that killed her family.

A heartbreakingly moving and unforgettable story about what love means – the exquisite stirrings of first love, the love between fathers and sons, friendship and family, life and death – and making peace with the past in order to find a future.