Alex Capus – författare

In November 1913, three German shipbuilders, led by master shipwright Anton Ru ter, were ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm II to dismantle a steam ship, send the parts to German East Africa, and reassemble it on Lake Tanganyi- ka. Their initial aim of getting the task done quickly and returning home to claim an excellent salary is quickly eclipsed by the enchantment of the exotic landscape, the governor's beautiful wife, and the violent machinery of colonialism. At the same time, Winston Churchill sends Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simson to transport two dilapidated and incongruously named gun-boats, Mimi and Toutou, to the other side of the lake. When World War I breaks out the Germans and British are facing each other, and the boat-builders reluctantly find themselves having to fight under the unsympathetic Captain-Lieutenant Gustav von Zimmer.

Alex Capus follows every step of Robert Louis Stevenson's last years, studying every clue left behind by the Scottish writer and reaching his own conclusion about the most dramatic turn in Stevenson's life: his decision to settle in Samoa, where the climate was poison for his already diseased lungs. When he arrived there in 1889, neither Stevenson nor his family particularly liked the Pacific island and wanted to stay for only a few days. Yet soon afterwards he changed his mind and, intriguingly, spent what little remained of his savings on a plot of land and began living there on a meagre income. Before long Stevenson set about building an opulent villa and lived out the rest of his days in splendour. What had happened? Capus asserts that Stevenson not only wrote the world-famous novel "Treasure Island" here but searched for the treasure himself and furthermore found it towards the end of his life, on a little island he could see from the peak of the mountain in Samoa where he settled.

Summer 1918. The First World War is drawing to a close when Leon Le Gall, a French teenager from Cherbourg who has dropped out of school and left home, falls in love with Louise Janvier. Both are severely wounded by German artillery fire, are separated, and believe each other to be dead. Briefly reunited two decades later, the two lovers are torn apart again by Louise's refusal to destroy Leon's marriage and by the German invasion of France. In occupied Paris during the Second World War, where Leon struggles against the abhorrent tasks imposed upon him by the SS, and the wilds of Africa, where Louise confronts the hardships of her primitive environment, they battle the vicissitudes of history and the passage of time for the survival of their love.