Newly graduated photography student Lori Maddox chooses to spend the year after university travelling and visits China where she finds casual work as a private English tutor. When she disappears, her parents Jo and Tom, who separated when Lori was a toddler, travel to China to find their daughter. Landing in a totally unfamiliar country, with no knowledge of the customs or language, and receiving scant help bordering on indifference from the local authorities, Jo and Tom are forced to turn detective, following in Lori's footsteps, tracing the people she mentioned in her blogs, interviewing her friends, colleagues and students. It's an unbearably difficult challenge, made harder as all the reasons for the breakdown of their relationship 20 years earlier resurface with a vengeance.