For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers.
In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men -sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres.
Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.
David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including The Great World, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger, Remembering Babylon, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff Every Move You Make, his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street and Ransom. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. He was born in 1934 and was brought up in Brisbane and now lives in Sydney.