It is 1968, and Billy Palmer has dropped out of university and left the West Country behind. He is determined to go to Marrakesh and find himself, but his first stop must be London. When he arrives, Billy takes a cramped room in a boarding house and talks his way into a job at a bookshop, and then begins to explore the streets of Soho, where the political protests and pretty girls swirl about him. But even as he is caught up in the music and the parties, Billy is dreaming of a bigger adventure and plotting his escape to Morocco, with its snake charmers and story tellers and its vast golden deserts, where anything is possible and where his life will really begin .