A sixteen-year-old English boy and a French girl are trapped beneath the ruins of a collapsed building. The result of a terrorist suicide bombing of the French barracks in Beirut, 1983. They cannot see one another, but their voices keep each other alive for five days. Each voice beseeching and encouraging the other to survive the maelstrom within which they are incarcerated. A lifelong infatuation with each other's voice follows, and the search to hear that voice again and to find its owner begins. Their searches follow different paths through the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, the genocide of Rwanda and to Afghanistan. Relationships, tragedy and humour guide those paths, but there is only one goal. That goal is to find the voice.