Elspeth Baillie, a young Scottish actress, is chosen by enigmatic impresario Lord Coak for an acting career on the Island of Barbados. At first fêted by the colonial gentry, her life in the Caribbean does not go according to plan. Elspeth is obliged to take on a temporary and ambiguous role in the closed world of Coak’s remote sugar plantation. Dolan’s plot is full of unexpected twists as Elspeth becomes ever more the prisoner of a venture whose founding principle is white supremacy. Captain Shaw, the factor, sets about building a New Caledonia whose reality for Elspeth and her new compatriots is a sense of timelessness and loss. Nature, ideology and the drive to maximise profit conspire to endanger the invented community. Elspeth is left trying to make sense of her own life and youthful ambitions among a shipwrecked people dreaming of home. Linguistically rich and narratively hypnotic, Dolan’s novel asks what makes a nation. Bloodlines? Language? History? Or...

Captain Robert Haldane wakes up in a strange room, in an old house, surrounded by a beautiful but ramshackle orchard, miles from anywhere. The last thing he can remember is his helicopter being shot down over enemy territory. It appears he is in a safe house, cared for by an elderly holy man and his niece. But how did Haldane get there, and who are these people really? With time he suspects there is someone else in the house. The soldier tracks her down: Aliyyah, a beautiful young veiled woman. Is she, too, being kept against her will, or even her knowledge? And is there really a curse on this family?Aliyyah is a modern Arabian tale, set in an unnamed war-torn country. It is a Romeo and Juliet story, but one for an age where scientific materialism is crossing bloody swords with religion. What divides these two lovers is not the war outside, or the imminent arrival of Haldane's troops, but how they interpret the world.