Pip’s world is small. But it’s about to become a whole lot bigger.

For years she’s tucked away her dreams, shrinking herself into the space left behind – like the delicate origami she creates alone in her room.

Then hope comes from an unlikely place: an astronomer from the local observatory. He teaches her to look up at the stars, and to see a world far bigger and more beautiful than she ever imagined.

And perhaps in that big, beautiful universe there’s someone waiting for her. If she can find the courage to open her heart.

Pip never stopped dreaming, but now it’s time for her to live – and maybe even to fall in love.

Cephus Twala is dying. During his final moments he foresees the arrival of a descendant of his, a man not yet born, January Twala.

Helen Botes, one-time apartheid apparatchik, cannot reach her son. During her anxious marshalling of a home bent on disrepair, she’s attacked by an intruder who wants only to suck on her finger.

And Steven Moyo, environmental refugee and soft-hearted Red Ant, has resolved to seek out the strange squatter who claims to have walked from a fading future to save a neglected past.

The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember.

Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other.

Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage.

And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.

Sheldon Soleskin should be having a horrible day. Even though he’s been unexpectedly transferred to a new school right before the holidays, has only one day to set up his new classroom, and just discovered his twin sister's been hiding an invitation to his ex-boyfriend’s Christmas Eve wedding, he’s still ready to take on the world with a smile on his face and a skip in his step.

Theo Berenson just wants to be left alone to his custodial duties. But when the chipper new first-grade teacher needs help moving furniture the Sunday after Thanksgiving, he's forced to do something he detests ... help. To make matters worse, Theo's overbearing parents are coming for Hanukah in a few weeks, and he's told them he has a boyfriend. Except he doesn't. Because who would want to date an oaf like Theo?

Working together, these opposites discover they might be able to help each other out. Agreeing to be each other’s dates, they become friends as they practice for their upcoming events. But when all the rehearsing starts feeling a little too real, and both men's pasts come roaring back to haunt them, will they be able to pull off the ultimate holiday masquerade?