Dércio Mondlane, a thirty-four-year-old failed tech entrepreneur from Lisbon, flees the wreckage of his professional life to return to the Ilha de Moçambique. He arrives carrying nothing but a laptop bag containing the remnants of his company’s legal records and a sealed envelope left by his late grandmother, Mariana.

His mission is ostensibly simple: deliver the envelope to the "House of Tembe," a name that has been scrubbed from the official history of the island.

​Upon arrival, Dércio is met with the quiet, sharp hostility of Eulália (Lalá) Mavunga, the pragmatic manager of the Pensão de Saudade. Lalá is a woman holding her world together by sheer will in the wake of her own grandmother's death. The tension between them is immediate... he is the "Lisbon boy", and she is the guardian of a house that has been waiting for a Mondlane to return for forty-three years.

​As the tropical heat and the slow pace of the island begin to strip away Dércio’s European pretenses, he is forced to confront the fact that his arrival is not a coincidence.