Unmotivated and dormant, Jack is drawn into the rampant whirlwind of Neil Blake, who he meets one windy night on the Holloway Road. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's famous road novel, the two young men climb aboard Jack's Figaro and embark on a similar search for freedom and meaning in modern-day Britain.
Seventeen-year-old schoolboy Kim is an idle drifter at Britain's Eton College - crammed with over a thousand boys and not a girl in sight. His head is full of the Falklands War and a possible army career, until the day he hears his new piano teacher, the beautiful but pained India, playing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.
Following an arduous and tragic sea journey to Australia, Hamil travels into the outback to find work and is taken in by a fellow Turkish immigrant. Initially they are widely accepted into the community as ice cream sellers and Halim as a Halal butcher.