John Holdsworth, chief mate of the Meteor, leaves his young wife Dolly in the Kentish village of Southbourne for a voyage to America in 1827. What begins as a young man's bold departure becomes a catastrophe: the ship founders in the Atlantic, and Holdsworth survives ten unbearable days in a lifeboat with seven others, witnessing horrors that leave only him alive. When rescue comes, his body is broken and his mind is blank, erased by trauma into perfect amnesia. Taken to Australia, he lives five years as a clerk under an assumed name, drawn inexplicably back to England. In 1832, a chance encounter in a London tavern cracks open his sealed past, and he begins a journey toward Kent, toward Dolly, toward a memory that threatens to undo him. Russell writes with visceral authority of the sea's cruelty and the stranger territory of the human heart grappling with lost identity. This is adventure as psychological reckoning, what remains of love when a man no longer knows who he was?
