When Mike and his wife Sara decide to foster a 12-year-old Bosnian refugee, they have no premonition of the far-reaching consequences. Jasminka evolves from a traumatised child of the bitter ethnic conflicts of besieged Sarajevo into Minkie, an English schoolgirl-with-a-difference in Middle England. She also becomes the daughter Mike has always wanted and Sara cannot have, and one of the excuses for Sara to resume an old affair. Mike's assignments continue to take him to Bosnia and Serbia and he finds himself emotionally drawn into the conflict for reasons he could never have imagined and which have a profound effect on the deepening rift at home. As shifting international tensions are about to change the world forever, Minkie returns to Sarajevo to see her roots and decide her future, just as Mike and Sara must decide on theirs as the events of 9/11 approach. This began as a one-off novel, but many people asked me 'what happened next', so it has become the first book in a trilogy on the effects of war on the children and grandchildren of participants.

The theme is the effect of war on succeeding generations. Of three main threads, the first concerns an Australian, Jake, who sees a close English friend and fellow prisoner of war die by friendly fire in Germany. He eventually takes his friend’s widow and son to Australia. Fifty years later, when she learns of this, his granddaughter travels to the UK to research family history and find the truth behind her troubled growing up.The second is Luke, whose adored grandfather was badly damaged in the First World War. The third is Minkie, a young Bosnian woman who has returned to war-torn Sarajevo after being fostered through her teenage years by a couple in a village in middle England. This village of Daerley Green in Oxfordshire is where all three threads come together as the truth of the various circumstances unfolds and unlikely relationships are made or broken.