A search for missing documents in an international mining company becomes a voyage into dangerous waters.

A dead friend, a lost lover and a clutch of mysteries from Jonathan Kellaway's youth in Cornwall and Italy in the late 1960s come back to haunt him when he is tasked with discovering why there is a gaping hole in his employer's records - and to tempt him with the hope that he may at last learn the truth about the tragedies of those years. It is a truth that has claimed several victims before. If he pursues it hard and long enough, he may only add himself to the list.

But pursue it he will. Because the truth, he comes to realize, is the secret that has consumed his life. This time he will not stop ... until he has found it.

Anyone who’s visited the Eden Project – or simply driven through the area on the A30 heading for the beaches of the far west – will have seen the strange, white-capped moonscape that is Cornwall’s china clay country. The industry has   left very visible scars, some of them oddly beautiful: vast, derelict drying sheds, cobalt blue lakes in abandoned pits, verdant green conical hills of overgrown waste. And naturally it’s shaped the lives of generations of local people who have worked in it.

Travelling round the china clay country, I felt instinctively it had that indefinable resonance that attracts me to a place as the setting for a novel. I knew then that it would have to be a novel spanning several decades, simply to reflect the scale and history of the industry, not to mention its international dimension: china clay is big business around the world.

But at its heart, in Cornwall, it’s also a family business. And so this novel is very much the story of a family, the Wrens of St Austell, and the tragedies that strike them as they struggle to adjust to changing times. Those tragedies appear at first sight to be nothing more than the vagaries of fate. But the story’s central character, Jonathan Kellaway, a man who has made a career and a good living out of china clay, is forced in the course of the novel to confront the frightening possibility that something altogether more sinister lies behind the misfortunes of the Wren family.

The span of the story gives us the opportunity to travel with Kellaway through more than forty years of his life, during which Wren & Co transforms itself from a small, uncompetitive company into thriving multinational Intercontinental Kaolins. But there is a price to be paid for that transformation by people Kellaway knows and loves. Eventually, he will have to face the truth of what has happened to them – and to himself.

Journey with him from the heady days of his 1960s youth through to the terrible discoveries of his later years. Industries rise and fall and families with them. But some lost loves can be regained. And some defeats can be redeemed. Decide for yourself if you back Jonathan Kellaway to win through against the odds.