A high-stakes and increasingly timely novel. When the rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and 500 fellow refugees from Sri Lanka's bloody civil war reaches the shores of British Columbia, the young father believes the struggles that he and his six-year-old son have long faced are finally over. But their journey has only just begun. The group is thrown into a detention processing centre, with government officials and news headlines speculating that among "the boat people" are members of a separatist militant organization responsible for countless suicide attacks -- and that these insurgents now pose a threat to Canada's national security.