”Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense... A masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the idea of home and the limits of love” GuardianCharlie`s experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Nagaland during the Second World War are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk and newly married to Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. Starting a family and working the land seem the best things a man can be doing. But a chasm exists between them. Memories flood Charlie`s mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present. Though hidden even to himself, the darkest secrets of Charlie`s adventures in the strange and shadowy ridges of the Nagaland mountains, his dream-like encounters with the mysterious and ancient tribesmen, leak and bleed through his consciousness. What should be said and what left unsaid? Is it possible to forge a new life in the wake of unfathomable horror? A beautifully conceived, deftly controlled and delicately wrought meditation on the isolating impact of war, the troubling legacies of colonialism and the inescapable reach of the past, Georgina Harding`s haunting, lyrical novel questions the very nature of survival, and what it is that the living owe the dead.