The author of A Time for Role Call (2017), Checkmate (2013) and To the Great Sea (2011), Doug Thompson's latest novel is predicated on a historical tragedy and a family mystery, and is set on an island in Queensland, in 1850. It follows the fortunes of a man seeking a new identity and a new life, in bleak circumstances. "As a guest with friends on Stradbroke Island, I stumbled across the twenty-six graves of the typhus victims from the stricken ' Emigrant '," Doug (who lives in the Lake District) explains. "It might never have become a novel had I not lighted on the notion of including my maternal grandfather, Whitehaven-born William Crosby, among the ship's passengers. After his release from prison, where he had been committed for bigamy, he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. His disappearance was a lifelong sorrow for my mother and grandmother (from Redhills, Penrith), while for me, as a child, it assumed mythical proportions." In the novel, Will Crosby, completing his sentence, quits England for a new career in the Queensland constabulary. He needs to regain his self-esteem and the respect of his 'wife', Alice Fallowfield.

But the outbreak of typhus abroad the Emigrant and the ship's quarantining at the ill-prepared station on Stadbroke Island, throw his plans awry. Amid the months' long fear, anxiety, deaths and hostile, even criminal, behaviour on the island, unexpected friendships are forged, bonds established, and for the leading characters the possibility of a new life in a new land gradually emerges. "In writing the novel," Doug confesses, "make-believe gradually came to feel more and more like reality, and my reprobate grandfather's mystery seemed finally to be solved, and he himself redeemed.".