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It is 1973. Jim Kennoway, a distinguished ornithologist and Second World War veteran, has just left his work at the Natural History Museum in New York, turned his back on his family and retreated to an island boathouse off the coast of Maine. His desires are simple: to be left alone with his cigarettes, gin and battered copy of Treasure Island, and to forget.
Jim's solitude is shattered when Cadillac Baketi, a tall, ebullient and dazzlingly bright young woman from the Solomon Islands arrives on her way to study medicine at Yale University. Cadillac is the daughter of Tosca, an island scout Jim befriended during the war when they collected and skinned birds while spying on the Japanese. Jim curses the intrusion as he finds his thoughts catapulting back to his youth and a dark truth about his time in the Solomons. Yet it may be that Cadillac, from the Pacific islands Jim thought he'd left behind, can teach him to be human again.
About the author
Alice Greenway, geb. 1964 in Washington D.C., aufgewachsen in Hongkong, Bangkok, Washington, Jerusalem und Massachusetts, studierte an der Yale University. Heute lebt die Autorin mit ihrer Familie in Edinburgh, Schottland.
Summary
From the award-winning author of White Ghost Girls comes an evocative tale of memory, loss - and the redemptive power of friendship.
Foreword
From the award-winning author of White Ghost Girls comes an evocative tale of memory, loss - and the redemptive power of friendship.
Report
Alice Greenway creates intensely believable characters who come from other places and other times. The Solomon Islands become characters as rich and three-dimensional as any other. She captures so well the unsleeping tragedies of the past, and how these bear in upon the present. Helen Dunmore
