Author(s): Alice Greenway

Fiction

Thirty years after the end the Second World War, veteran Jim Kennoway has retreated to his beach house on Fox Island, off the coast of Maine. With only the birdsong and his battered copy of Treasure Island for company, Jim's sole visitors are those who bring his weekly supplies of whisky, cigarettes and writing paper. Jim hides away from his former life as a renowned ornithologist, but also deep, darker truths: the death of his wife, and the bloody days he spent fighting the war in the Pacific. But the past looms ever larger - the beauty and tumult of the tiny Solomon Island of Layla, and the unlikely friendship he formed there with a young man named Tosca; and the days they spent skinning birds, and hunting and murdering Japanese soldiers. Summer comes to Maine, and Jim receives a visitor from Layla with the unlikely name of Cadillac. She is Tosca's daughter, and her presence is unwelcome as the tide of recollections that trail in her wake. Slowly, and despite his efforts to resist, Jim discovers that this young woman is a balm; that there is pleasure as well as sorrow in friendship, and in the memories of a life punctuated by adventure, love and war.