Drinking late one night in an East End club, a writer is approached by Pascal, the friend of a man named Desiree who claims he knows the writer from growing up in Orkney - and that he's dying and wants him to write his story. The writer ignores him. But a month later, a package arrives containing, among discs, sunglasses and other trinkets, a photograph of the writer aged eight. So he listens to the discs and emerges amazed and shaken. He then transcribes this heartbreaking story which traces Desiree's life as a bullied youth in South Ronaldsay to the streets of Soho where he reduces his...