A nameless character, a middle aged lady, a farmer, has climbed up to the top of a hill and is now looking down onto a village; a small area that captures her life, her family and everything she has done in her life. As she imagines everything she has done in the village down below, the life she has lead in this small village and the family she has created. This is part one of this story.

In part two we are introduced to Garena, who works as a cleaner. Every Thursday she stays on after her job is finished to smoke and talk to her employer. Through these discussions the reader learns about Garena’s life.

Garena’s house burnt down last year and so she made a new house; a house under her father’s house. She is proud that she could build a new house quickly and proud that her and her son Nathan can live under her father’s house. She wants to save up and build a new house. Garena is proud of her son Nathan; he her only child and she his only parent. They are friends, bound by the struggle they share in living their day to day lives. They both aspire for more, they both want the best for Nathan.

It is revealed that Garena’s mother was murdered just before Nathan was born. The killer was never found and this murder prompted Garena’s father to move out of the village and to the city. Garena followed shortly after and started working. Only recently she started working for her Thursday employer and only recently did their conversations begin.

Garena’s Thursday employer is not from the same country, she is an expatriate. She is interested in Garena’s life and interested in the story behind her cleaner. She used this to accept more of the people she meets and goes for dinner with some people she has never met before. This contrast proves to her that she will always remain an outsider amongst this foreign place and these foreign people.

In the final part of the story, the story is told through Nathan’s voice. He is a boy with a desire for change, a drive to provide a better life for himself and his mother. But this task seems impossible to reach, and so he can only imagine it from the top of a tree that he has climbed.

The story closes with a return to the hill in the opening of the novel. The lady on top of the hill is becoming more and more desperate for clarity, more of an understanding of her life and her village. The story ends with her moving towards the edge of a rock.