The author of A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach now gives us his most ambitious and seductive novel to date - part suspense, part romance, all grand storytelling. It is told in flashback. It opens in Hollywood of the 1930's, where the narrator - a young woman, an architect - is approached by an elderly man who claims to be her father. He persuades her to accompany him to Lisbon in search of the woman who was the great lost love of his life. And on the journey he tells the story of what happened to him decades before when he was a surgeon in war-torn Manila. It is a story of intrigue played out against the exotic, violent background of the Philippines in 1902; a story of medicine; of the murder of American soldiers; of the magical creation of a flying machine. It is the story of a sinister web of conspiracy spun by the old guard at Manila's great hospital as the young surgeon stands alone against intransigence and corruption. And at the heart of the book, marvelously told: the grand passion that draws him into an unknown world of infinite danger.