Publisher's Synopsis
Hopewell Shakespeare is a young apprentice in London. He is besotted with the Globe where the plays of his distant cousin, William, fuel his fantasies of love and fortune. He joins the crew of a pirate, Captain Wolfe, on The Golden Dragon, searching for the legendary Lost Island ruled by the Lord of Alchemists.
But Hopewell is suspicious of the second mate Davy Jones and the ship's boy Kit Sly, and beset by visions of a beautiful woman and predictions of a White Ship. When the Golden Dragon pursues and is wrecked by such a ship, Hopewell seems to be sole survivor, cast up on an island inhabited only by an elderly scholar, Dr Prosper Bonaventure, a girl, Flora, and her goat, Caprice. But who from the wreck is truly lost, and who has survived? What is real and what is illusion? Who is evil and who is good? Which is the Lord of Alchemists who manipulates them all? As Hopewell struggles through the twists of an enchanted world, the scales begin to fall from his eyes ...
