Colourful, haunting and lively, this is a compelling novel, weaving together the past and present. In the late eighteenth century, in a London basement, a gifted boy and his indifferent stepfather create a tapestry of a famed mythical creature. Isolated in his grief after a crippling bereavement, the child Angelo becomes perversely enraptured with the woven portrait. His imaginings combine with his innocence to set him upon a quest that lures him far from civilisation, to the South Seas. In the present is Southlander Gilda Page: modern, pragmatic, yet somehow adrift. She decides love is for fools, and sets her heart on a homecoming. But what is the secret of the family curse and of the dreams that plague her?