Seventeen-year-old, Rani, born to Vietnamese parents in a small regional town on Australia's east coast, attends her local high school and works, part time in her parents' restaurant. Seen as different and with a life narrowed by the limitations of school and work, she creates a private world through her extraordinary talent as a sketch artist. However, when a simple school research assignment sends her to the local nursing home, a new world opens. Rani meets eighty-year-old, wheelchair bound David, a long-retired teacher of English literature. It is here that friendship, tragedy and a love of art and literature allows both to explore meaning and to discover the power and beauty of difference.