National Network for Equitable Library Service

When Elizabeth Thiessen embarks on an expedition to study the cave murals of Baja California, Mexico, she is catapulted onto a mythical, existential journey into the unknown. Within days of landing in the Baja, Elizabeth discovers that her daughter, Patricia—posted in Afghanistan with the Canadian armed forces—is taken hostage by the Taliban. Elizabeth struggles with her decision to remain on assignment, her extreme anxiety over her daughter’s kidnapping, and the recollections it prompts of her conflicted relationship with her father, a Holocaust survivor. Her psychological fragility is pushed to the brink by the field expedition’s physical hardships, and is intensified by her romantic involvement with Richard Wellington, one of seven of the international team of anthropologists commissioned to study the pictographs. Believed to have been painted over 4,000 years ago by a tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers, the pictographs mirror Elizabeth personal crisis and eventually help her overcome her mounting feelings of despair and powerlessness. On a personal level Elizabeth is compelled to realize that if her daughter survives her ordeal, like her father, Stanislaw, she will no longer be the same person.