The past is another country and we are all its exiles. Banished forever we look back in
fascination and wonder at this mysterious land. Who were the people who populated it? Almost
two hundred years ago Abraham an illiterate urchin scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams
of running away to sea... Naomi a seventeen-year-old seamstress sits primly in a second class
carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city... George
a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Foot marries his Irish bride Annie in the
cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms. Now these people exist
only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough. They lived
loved felt joy and fear and ultimately died. But who were they? And what indissoluble thread
binds them together? Simon Mawer's compelling and original novel puts flesh on our ancestors'
bones to bring them to life and give them voice from the vitality of Dickensian London to the
excitement of seafaring in the last days of sail and the horror of the trenches of the Crimea.
There is birth and death there is love both open and legal but also hidden and illicit. Yet
the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known - the
unbreakable bond of family.
