This stunning debut novel follows one man's quest to find the missing link in evolutionary science - through the life of a maverick nineteenth-century inventor. Douglas Pitt is a man obsessed. His quest to prove the genius of Samuel Highgate Syme, inventor and pioneering American geologist, has stalled. Pitt's postulation is simple enough: Syme, through some fault, wrong-doing or mischance, has not been credited for hitting upon the key-discovery of modern geology - the theory of continental drift. Laughed at and dismissed at every turn, Pitt's luck changes when he discovers a contemporary manuscript written by a scientist, Friedrich Muller, which recounts a year (1821) in the company of the irrepressible Syme. Perhaps this will finally reveal his genius . . .