Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

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

(From Publisher).

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE is the author of The Vision of Elena Silves (1989), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award. His other novels include The High Flyer, for which he was nominated for the Grants list in 1993 and The Dancer Upstairs which was chosen by the American Libraries Association as the best novel of 1997. In 1999 his biography, Bruce Chatwin, was published to great critical acclaim.

This new novel by an internationally recognised writer brings to life the "claustrophobic, gossipy, defiant " island society in which it is set.