SYNOPSIS (The story in brief)

Songs from the Violet Café

Violet Trench is the autocratic owner of the Violet Café, located in a tourist town in the North Island. Her staff consists mostly of young girls who have difficult home lives. Violet believes she can make a difference to them. She rules them with a rod of iron, 'for their own good'. Her cook is a beautiful slim-hipped young Chinese man, called John Wing Lee. It is here, and to these people, that Jessie Sandle, comes unexpectedly, one spring evening, after having run away from her home in Wellington. Her life will be changed forever.

The young people in the cafe work late, live separate lives from the rest of the townspeople and see themselves as having something of a law of their own. A tragedy strikes that will scatter the group around the world. Jessie leaves behind small town disasters and takes on the world stage, as she becomes a foreign correspondent in Asia. In war torn Cambodia, the past she had thought she had left behind, comes back to haunt her.