1942. Nisha's Malayan home has been destroyed by war. She and her mother Amma flee to her father's ancestral house in England perched on a cliff top on the cold Northern coast. When Amma falls gravely ill Nisha is left to face her formidable grandmother alone. The old woman's rules are countless including forbidding Nisha to climb the Weeping Tree - a claw of leafless twisted branches jutting upwards from the crag. But when a ghost child beckons Nisha to sit under its boughs and promises her Amma's life in return for three truths the tree's pull proves irresistible . . .