"At the age of seven, in a London workhouse, newly-orphaned James meets ten-year-old Peter. Mysterious, mercurial, thoughtless to the point of cruelty, Peter nonetheless takes a liking to James. The two forge a strange friendship, bound together by their shared love of stories...But one fateful night, Peter vanishes from his bed, and in the morning James is found lying alone and broken in the courtyard outside...Over twenty years later, on the deck of a whaling ship in the frozen wastes of the Arctic...James's obsession with finding his childhood friend will lead him to mutiny and murder, beyond the edges of the world, and finally to an island that shouldn't exist"--