The Hesperides tree

By the author ofHopeful Monsters, winner of the 1990 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. An eighteen-year-old boy travels with his parents to the west coast of Ireland where his father is involved in a wildlife station where biologists study the causes of variations among species of birds. This research has centered on an island with ruins of cells where hermits in the Dark Ages had lived. The boy also falls in love with a young girl who, it seems, might be involved with gun-runners. Returning to university in England where he has intended to study Biology or Literature, he finds neither of these disciplines relevant. He goes back on his own to Ireland to try to discover what, if anything, those old hermits had been looking for. Is it possible that human nature, like a species of bird, might evolve and change?