My Beautiful Enemy

Arthur Wheeler worked as a guard in an enemy alien camp during the Second World War. There he became infatuated with a Japanese youth, and the feeling has never left him. He remembers the young man's looks as something close to a miracle, though in the few photographs he kept the boy seems almost miserable.

When the youth faces forced deportation to Japan, a country in ruins, Arthur abandons his wife and baby son. He sets out to rescue his lover, a mission that looks doomed from the start.

The book is a secret history told in Arthur's own voice. It follows a soldier at war with his sexuality and in dangerous conflict with the racism that underpins a crumbling British Empire. Desire and redemption run against the backdrop of a savage racial war.

Four decades on, Arthur is still caught up in the traumatic events of his youth. He proposes one last reunion with his lost lover, hoping to put his ghosts to rest. That mission, too, looks unlikely to succeed, and the book keeps heartache close throughout.