A remarkable literary hybrid -- part biography, part detective story - about the enduring figure of Robinson Crusoe.
January, 1719. A man sits at a table, writing. Nearly sixty, Daniel Defoe is troubled with gout and 'the stone', burdened with a large family and debts, mired in political controversy and legal threats. But for the moment he is preoccupied by a younger man on a barren shore -- Robinson Crusoe.
Several miles south another old man, Robert Knox, sits bent over a heavy volume -- the only book he has written, published nearly forty years before. The large folio is now worn...