Undiscovered Country
Venzuela, 1950s — love in the oilfields.
In the blazing oilfields of 1950s Venezuela, eleven-year-old Antonia Lindberg is growing up between worlds: between England and the tropics, childhood and adulthood, innocence and knowledge.
At La Soledad, an isolated company settlement beside Lake Maracaibo, summer days unfold in brilliant colour—swimming pools, jungle roads, beach parties and midnight dances. Yet beneath the polished rituals of expatriate life lie private griefs, old wartime wounds and desires no one dares to name.
When Karel van Wel, a troubled Dutch boy, is drawn into Antonia’s world, she begins to see the adults around her with unsettling clarity: her restless mother, her charismatic and unreliable stepfather, and the strangers whose pasts have followed them across the sea. As friendships shift and secrets gather force, the landscape itself seems to become charged with danger and possibility.
Atmospheric, psychologically acute and quietly haunting, Undiscovered Country is a richly observed novel about exile, memory, longing and the fragile stories people construct in order to survive.