Hugh Arkwright is seven when he is transposed from a wondrous childhood in the bush of Central Africa to a cold, bleak landscape in the rural west of England. There he is raised by an eccentric uncle whose devotion to theosophical mysticism borders on lunacy and whose dubious charms win from Hugh the woman he loves. Hugh does not accustom easily to loss: Six years after he was packed off to "civilized" England, his mother one day simply walked out of her house in Africa and disappeared into its vast, unmapped lands. And he acquired a ghost. Brilliantly wrought and vividly imagined, the story of the decorated war veteran and celebrated theater director Hugh Arkwright's return to the sad house of his childhood and adolescence casts modern, so-called civilized values in a startling, visionary light and with an unexpected, staggering revelation unravels the mystery at its heart.