Thirty years after the end the Second World War, veteran Jim Kennoway has retreated to his beach house on Fox Island, off the coast of Maine. With only the birdsong and his battered copy of Treasure Island for company, Jim's sole visitors are those who bring his weekly supplies of whisky, cigarettes and writing paper. Jim hides away from his former life as a renowned ornithologist, but also deep, darker truths: the death of his wife, and the bloody days he spent fighting the war in the Pacific. But the past looms ever larger - the beauty and tumult of the tiny Solomon Island of Layla, and...