After Kiran loses her mother, she escapes to the Welsh countryside – to allow herself to grieve away from turbulent city life in London, to leave her toxic family behind, and to find solace in the purity of the natural world. She openly wonders, ‘what’s a brown city girl like me doing in the Welsh countryside?’, but she quickly discovers a sense of belonging in the small, close-knit community she finds there; her neighbour Sarah, who teaches her how to sledge when the winter snow arrives; Jane, a 70-year-old woman who lives at the top of a mountain with three dogs and four alpacas with an inspiring attitude for life; and Wilf, the farmer who taught Kiran that the cuckoo arrives in April and leaves in July. Here is a tender, philosophical memoir about the beauty of a microscopic life, the value of solitariness, and respecting the rhythm and timing of the earth.