Henderson is a Man of Empire. He has seen the world ebb and flow. When he dies, he leaves behind a treasure trove of objects, of momentoes to a life well-lived. To his grand-daughter, Liv, he has always been a shadowy figure whose stories exist on an almost mythical plane, until, clearing her mother's house, she discovers his diaries, which offer a glimpse into a world beneath the polished facade of Victorian England. Some years later Liv finds herself writing to the daughter she hasn't seen since birth and tracing the patterns which have brought her to a Polynesian jail and which stretch back to the last century and to Henderson. In 1892, Henderson set sail on a journey accompanying Queen Victoria's young grandsons, the Princes George and Eddy, on a two year sojourn around the South Seas. During that voyage, the events he witnesses are to have a near fatal effect on his life. A century later, Liv is left to piece together the fragments of his life and their meaning while at the same time attempting to clarify the more recent past: her own peculiar predicament and the disappearance of her father in the aftermath of the Korean War. The journey she undertakes is as harrowing as anything Henderson experiences but is informed by the weight of subsequent generations...