Synopsis:
Ray Greenland is an exemplary family man and Thames River pilot who can navigate people safely in the here and now, while his wife Lily, in her capacity as a director of a dating agency, arranges their happy futures. But what none of those around him know, including Lily and their children, is that Ray's life is not his own; he is mortgaged to a past that might, at any time, come to claim him back.

When Ray was twelve he did something so wrong he must live under a false identity for the rest of his life. He tries to atone by loving his family, while protecting them against the pernicious truth; telling stories from other people's happier lives and claiming them as his own. The only safe place for him is on the lower reaches of the Thames. But it’s on land where Ray's past resurfaces and a lifetime of caution may not be enough to save him.

Synopsis:
Eleven suicide bombers turn the Arsenal stadium at Ashburton Grove into an inferno during an Arsenal-Chelsea match. The narrator's husband and four-year-old son are blown to smithereens. She is left with an empty ex-Council flat in Bethnal Green and nothing to live for. And so she writes Osama Bin Laden a letter to tell him just what she thinks, a letter that forms that whole of this amazing novel, and takes the reader right into the dark heart of a London under siege.

The woman’s grief isn’t straightforward: she was having casual sex with another man when the stadium exploded on the TV screen. But her intense love for her son burns with a pure flame, and becomes a magnet for three people also seeking refuge from unhappiness. Jasper, the Sunday Telegraph journalist from across the street who was sharing her sofa when the attack happened; Petra, his manipulative girlfriend; and Terrence, her husband’s boss in the police force, now ‘fighting terror’ at Scotland Yard. As barrage balloons float over London and hovering helicopters enforce a midnight curfew, the woman negotiates the maze the maze of this complex, class-bound triangle, until Jasper decides to stage his own act of terror.