ABOUT
THE BOOK

Room XIX of the Museum of Albion doesn’t usually receive many visitors. But one day a crowd of immigrants and homeless gathers and demands to see a mummy that has recently been removed. As political pressure builds, the curator unpacks the tomb and begins to explore its bizarre contents, for herself and for the passionate young man who has adopted the mummy as the figurehead of his movement. It contains a bundle of curious objects and documents: they all tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman, Leto.
As Leto moves gradually westwards across the map form her childhood home, she slips through time. On the run, in a far off era of civil strife, she gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, survives in a desert stronghold as the lover of its commander, stows away in a ship loaded with plundered antiquities and then works as a chamber maid in a war-torn city. During a long siege she manages to save her daughter, but loses her son. As the novel sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages, to the treasure-hunting of Victorian Europe, and into the present day, Leto reappears, with her daughter Phoebe, in different guises. Eventually, in today’s Albion, Leto becomes a servant in the household of a rock singer; there, she begins to search for her son.