Following the death of his parents in a car crash, eleven-year-old Alex Dove is torn from his life on a remote farm in Tasmania and sent to school in England. When he returns to Australia twelve years later, the timeless beauty of the land and his encounter with a young woman whose own life has been marked by tragedy, persuade him to stay. They marry, and he finds himself drawn into the eccentric, often hilarious dynamics of island life. Longing for children, the couple open their home to a disquieting guest, a teenage castaway, whose presence in their home begins to unravel their tenuously forged happiness.

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE was born in Worcester in 1957 and grew up in the Far East and Latin America. He is the author ofThe Vision of the Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask awards,The High Flyer, for which he was nominated as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, andThe Dancer Upstairs, selected by the American Libraries Association as the best novel of 1997 and adapted for the film of the same title directed by John Malkovich. His last book wasIn Tasmania, winner of the 2007 Tasmania Book Prize. He is also the author of an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin.

A breathtaking new tale from Nicholas Shakespeare, who The Times called 'One of our best and truest novelists'.