Liv is writing from a Tahitian jail, piecing together her troubled past and her family's buried history for the unknown daughter she gave up at birth. The search for her own father, an airman missing since the Korean War, has brought her to the South Seas and landed her behind bars on a trumped-up murder charge. In the stillness of her cell, Liv recalls her childhood and the discovery she made while packing up the family house after her mother's recent death: the hidden diaries of her ancestor Frank Henderson, written in the 1890s.
Henderson's journals tell of a terrifying adventure in Africa and an extraordinary three-year voyage to Polynesia with Queen Victoria's grandsons - Prince George and his disturbed brother Prince Eddy. Henderson is driven to record what he remembers of this journey for fear that things he witnessed in the South Sea islands might have put his life in danger. His long-ago revelations lead Liv to understand her own past, especially her mother's strange behaviour and her father's disappearance.
'Henderson's Spear' traces two tales of passion and intrigue across a century and half the globe. It is at once a moving study of loss - of a parent, a child, a past - and an exploration of historical forces that nearly extinguished a people and still threaten the world today. Ronald Wright's deft touch and luminous prose makes this rich, powerful novel utterly compelling.
