Seaborne. The word echoes in Dermot's mind. Washed up from who knows where, with no people to belong to, no clan to speak for him: a man alone in the world. If this man lives, what will he turn out to be? What might he bring among the Islanders? John had not dreamed that anywhere in the North Atlantic could be this remote. There must be someone, if not here, then not far away, who even if they didn't speak English would at least recognise it. John Finlay, engineer, is running away from his failed business, his failed relationship and his debts. He runs away to sea. Dermot, pulling a body, barely alive, from the water, has never seen anyone so strangely dressed. His Celtic island knows nothing of debt or of engineering. And John, waking among a people who cannot understand his language, struggles to accept that he has been carried across time and into another world. From this starting point, tensions build between cultures and outlooks, and focus on Shinane, the blacksmith's daughter, who is looking for something beyond. John and Dermot find themselves stretched to their limits. It is a matter of survival, or transformation. Choice is key - and not only for John, Dermot and Shinane: the whole community finds itself caught up in conflict over The Seaborne.
