Dunedin

The story begins in nineteenth-century Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island, where Jack Mackenzie has come from Scotland to serve as a Presbyterian minister. His marriage is unhappy, and he finds plenty of diversion in the town's plant life and its more earthly temptations. When he is forced out of this garden of pleasures, the fallout reaches far beyond what he could have imagined. Decades later, his grandchildren are living in London, middle-aged and feeling that their best years are slipping away, and they are still looking for love.

Olive is bitter and lonely. She pursues Terry, an ambitious young writer who has fled his elderly parents' mobile home, and she also becomes fixated on a baby she takes from a busy Underground carriage. Her brother William is consumed by grief over the death of a former pupil and has walked away from his post as headmaster. Also among them is Jay Pascal, a young drifter from New Zealand whose parentage is unknown and whose longing to belong is painfully evident.

The novel is a family saga that moves between two countries and two eras, following characters whose lives are shaped by loss, longing and the search for connection.