What do you do when your wife abducts your children?

This was the question facing Douglas Galbraith when, in 2003, he returned home to Scotland from a few days' work in London.

The house was silent, empty and locked; his four and six-year-old sons' pyjamas lay on the bedroom floor. And on the doormat, confirmation from the Post Office of a forwarding address - in Japan. He has not seen them since.

This book goes to the very heart of relations between parents and children, men and women, and between races and nations - to the heart of what it is to be alive.

This book is a howl of pain, beautifully written by a man wounded beyond endurance * Sunday Telegraph *
A memoir and a meditation that is provocative, humorous, stimulating and profoundly affecting...accomplished...a great, unsettling book * Glasgow Herald *
Magnificent … as with the best art only suffering and loss can create such brilliance’ * Scottish Review of Books *
A curious first person account * Sunday Business Post *
Unsettling but moving true story * Big Issue in the North *

Douglas Galbraith was born in Glasgow in 1965 and is the author of three novels, The Rising Sun, A Winter in China, and King Henry. He lives in Scotland.