The story opens as a letter from Olivia, a Canadian filmmaker who writes from a Tahitian jail to the daughter she gave up for adoption at sixteen. Olivia's search for her own father, an airman missing since the Korean War, has brought her to the South Seas and landed her in prison on a trumped-up murder charge. The other main strand of the novel — based on fact — is told in the secret diaries of Frank to have been Jack the Ripper. Frank is driven to write down what he knows when he begins to suspect there are people who wish him out of the way.

As she fights to get out of jail, Olivia recalls her own childhood in the English house where Henderson once lived. There, while packing up the family home after her mother's death, she finds Henderson's old papers and learns of links between herself and him that she had never known, links that explain her mother's behaviour and her father's disappearance.

Written with a deep understanding of the landscape and culture of the South Sea islands, Henderson's Spear 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 us today. Ronald Wright's deft touch and luminous prose make this rich, powerful novel utterly compelling.

Praise for A Scientific Romance

"A Scientific Romance should...share with Fugitive Pieces the very upper rung of [20th-century Canadian literature]." — from Bill Richardson's foreword to Great Canadian Books of the Century

"An elegant novel...gripping and lyrical; you struggle to slow down but find yourself rushing forward." — The New Yorker

"A treasure...delightfully witty and suspenseful." — Alberto Manguel, The Globe and Mail

"Powerful...cunningly fashioned.... A profound meditation on the nature of time." — The New York Times Book Review

"Deeply seductive and brilliantly sustained." — The Observer

"A classic." — The Guardian

"A work of great beauty built on nightmare." — Boston Book Review

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ronald Wright is the internationally acclaimed author of A Scientific Romance, winner of the Britain's David Higham Prize for Fiction. His other major bestsellers include Time Among the Maya and Stolen Continents, and an acclaimed collection of travel pieces, Home and Away. He lives in Port Hope, Ontario.