Neil Quiller was a Kimberley bush pilot in the 1930s. But in 1941, he enlists in the WWII effort and becomes a photo-reconnaissance pilot in Malaya. Betrayed by a spy and shot down over the jungle, he escapes to Singapore ahead of the advancing Japanese. Here he finds love but he also encounters his self-centred cousin, Cameron Dunn, who demands from him an impossible promise.
When Singapore falls, Quiller, armed with hand-drawn maps and a school atlas, begins a treacherous journey home across land and sea.
Meanwhile, on the Australian west coast, Jeannie Verco runs Haarlem Downs, the Kimberley cattle station where Cameron was born and Neil grew up, and waits for war news that never comes. As cyclones form and the Japanese attack planeloads of Dutch refugees from Java, Jeannie finds friendship in the company of Anneliese, a young Javanese woman, who one day staggers in from the desert . . .
