Foreign Land

George Grey has been abroad for forty years. He returns home nursing a vision of an England that has vanished in his absence. His native country appears to him a cold, hostile, almost friendless wasteland and his homecoming from a warm, comfortable life in Africa is a nightmare. George can neither make head nor tail of his daughter, the last remnant of his family, nor she of him. He is immediately restless in his retirement and at once plans to escape -- not for the first time in his life -- in his own boat to sea.Once aboard his boat, his ark, George conjures up his earlier life -- and the characters and events of the past become subtly, intricately interwoven with the demons and uncertainties of the present. In the crowded theater of his tossing cockpit the crucial scenes of his life are played out: his childhood with unloving and unlovable parents; his wartime courtship and hasty marriage to a social butterfly; his glory days in the navy; his cozy life in West Africa where he passively shares a mistress with the Minister of Communication; and the (inadvertent) crime which both shapes and haunts his existence. These confused daydRaban, Jonathan is the author of 'Foreign Land' with ISBN 9780670807673 and ISBN 0670807672.