Book description
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 of
The 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, and
The 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 was
In Tasmania
, winner of the 2007 Tasmania Book Prize. He is also the author of an
acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin.
