A Lover's Rock Story

Handsworth, Birmingham. 1970s - early 1980s.
When Natrus first sees Margene - fifteen years old, impeccably composed, possessed of a voice that can stop a room - he is eleven years old, and he doesn't stand a chance. He will carry it quietly for a decade.
Natrus is a young man pulled in two directions - between the books and the street, between the ambition that drives him and the world that surrounds him. Handsworth in the 1970s offers both opportunity and temptation in equal measure, and Natrus navigates them with the particular intelligence of someone who has learned, early, that survival requires more than one kind of knowledge.
A decade later, they find each other again. Margene has become a fashion designer and singer - fiercely talented, fiercely private, shaped by years away from Birmingham and everything she left behind. Against the pulse and heat of the reggae scene - the sound systems, the blues parties, the sold-out nights at sound clashes - what has been quietly carried through the years finally becomes something real. Their love, tender and fierce, becomes the talk of a community that holds them both.
But love in Handsworth has always had to be fought for. And some forces cannot be outrun by love alone.
And some loves carry a weight that no amount of courage can lift alone.