It's West Africa in the early 1990s. Isabel Redmond is tiring of her iconoclastic husband's penchant for pendulous black breasts; an old English judge wanders through the scrub following a tribe of Fulani herdsmen; Bob Newpin is about to make a killing in time-shares; and, in a dusty warehouse in the heart of the city, a thin white woman is silently measuring out lengths of mauve cloth dotted with silver stars. Into this milieu of miscellaneous misfits and mavericks, arrives Daniel Maddison. Rebelling against the confines of diplomatic life, Daniel is drawn towards the people and places that lie way beyond the experience of his High Commission colleagues and their endless round of cocktail parties, golf and gossip.