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In 2026, PhD candidate Leang Keo lives in Minnesota and works on her PhD thesis: A Stranger to Her Blood: Survival, Intimacy, and the Concubine's Archive in Late Colonial Cambodia, 1900—1953. She touches a sandstone devata figurine and is unexpectedly transported back to 1940, inhabiting the body of a concubine known as Neang Keo. Neang had been a covert assassin, harboring a secret vial of poison with the intention of murdering the king, who will in fact die in six months. Leang refuses to carry out the murder Neang had planned, instead showing knowledge of agricultural infrastructure that draws the attention of the designated heir, Prince Sisowath Monireth. He arranges a rendezvous in the map room, where they spend countless hours discussing French colonial administrative structure and jurisdictional claims.
As the king's appointment with fate draws ever nearer, Leang Keo's position in the palace becomes increasingly precarious. She is seen touching the prince's hand, which angers the king, who insists on taking her to bed. Meanwhile, the prince kisses her in secret. She learns that she is expecting a child, and the palace reels from repeated attacks on the king's life, for which she makes a too-easy scapegoat.
In her latest book, the shockingly prolific Som Phin, who has penned nearly forty books in the last few years, examines a perilous moment in Franco-Cambodian relations through the lens of a forbidden romance. The Peggy Sue Got Married-style time-travel mechanism is inspired, but the romance lacks chemistry, with the two lovers spending much of the book discussing political minutiae. Of greater interest are the occasional bits of local color ("cucumber, young herbs, and a small dish of something sour with green mango"). The pace picks up in the back half as Leang faces multiple competing threats.