The Thread of Flame

A man comes to himself in a ship's bunk off the Nantucket lightship with no memory of who he is, lands in New York as "Jasper Soames" and makes a small life working in an antique shop — until a woman recognises him as a Boston gentleman long missing, and whispered to have run away on the battlefield in France. Going home means facing a wife, Vio, who has already begun to arrange her life around another man. Basil King wrote best-selling novels of conscience, and the amnesia here is used to ask what a man owes to a past he cannot remember. Fifty-six plates of painting by Hammershøi and Durand trace the quiet rooms and mountain light of a man's lost past through 1850 to 1918.