ABOUT
THE BOOK

In the early nineteen thirties, an ambitious young Scotsman sets out on the long sea voyage to Penang, eager to take up his post running a maternity hospital in the colony, and eager for the new opportunities that will open up for him there. He very quickly makes the acquaintance of two sisters, both very beautiful young women, one looking for a husband, the other married.

In the confines of the ship, when conventional morality is shelved for the duration, the seeds of a scandal, which will rock the close island community of Penang, are sown. Seventy years later, forty-something engineer Edward Mackay, recuperating from illness on the wild isolated island of Orkney, begins to unravel the story of a man he thought he knew: his father, the respectable Doctor Alexander Mackay, now years dead after a long and blameless career. What he discovers astonishes him, and begins to shed light on his own existence.