Baghdad. The last week of 2006. All over the city, people of different religions are being forced out of their homes on a daily basis and neighborhoods are being divided by concrete walls. At night, under curfew, the residents remain trapped inside their houses...SARA hunches over her computer obsessively scouring the internet: How many dead today? As her daughter sleeps fitfully against a muted background of mortars and gunfire, her mother scribbles numbers on scraps of paper and sticks them to a map of Baghdad stuck on the wall. At least if she keeps track of the attacks she can try to predict where the next one may happen...Sara is a novelist but no matter how hard she tries, she cannot write any more. It would all just be a lie anyway. Maybe she and her daughter should leave this unlivable place? Yet everything that matters to her is here and Reema seems alright; she tells jokes, plays tricks. But Reema knows much more than she tells her mother...When Sara's closest friend and neighbor, SABIHA, a former actress and a Christian, is threatened by a sectarian gang, Sara begins to fight back and recover a sense of defiance. But a random killing near Reema's school causes Sara to re-think things and she starts to look for a way out...Sara and Reema's story intersects with those of their neighbours: KAMAL, a former prisoner-of-war in Iran who is trying to erase the past; his pregnant wife MONA, who can't forget her children from a past marriage; and her mother NERMEEN, whose son was 'disappeared' by the regime. Elsewhere, Sara's manic-depressive friend DIJLA is always hunting for 'happy pills' while the pretty college student TAMARA keeps herself busy with music and fashion to distract herself from an unbearable reality. HAIDER, a teenager on the cusp of manhood, is being drawn into a sectarian gang as his father ABU HAIDER takes to the bottle. YAHYA, Sara's brother, has to choose between accepting bribes to stay in his job or leave the country too.Each facing a unique dilemma about how to live his or her life - which, for some, begs the questions of whether to leave Iraq or whether to stay.