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About
On his twelfth birthday, Victor Baxter is spirited away from boarding school by a stranger known only as the Captain who claims to have won him in a backgammon game with the boy's diabolical father. Settling into a new life in a dire London flat, Victor becomes the willing ward of his mysterious abductor and the tender and childless Liza. He quickly adapts to the only family he's ever known, despite the Captain's long disappearances on suspicious "adventures" and a guarded curiosity about this peculiar but devoted couple who call him son. Then one day, in pursuit of answers, and perhaps an adventure of his own, Victor responds to an entreaty from the Captain to come to Panama. What transpires in this world of dangerous imposture is absolutely revelatory-for both Victor and the Captain.
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Reviews
"This willingness to take the greatest fictional risks, this dissatisfaction with all that he has done before, this sense of life, which only the true, the exceptional novelist can infuse into his creations, are virtues which remind us that, at the age of 84, Graham Greene remains, as V. S. Pritchett said, 'one of the two or three living novelists who really count.'"
Brian Moore, The New York Times
"Exquisitely understated, moving and graced by humorous touches."
Publishers Weekly
"The master's hand is clearly at work."
The New York Times