Description
14-year-old Ian Sinclair is staying with his Aunt and Uncle on their dairy farm by the lake while his parents are overseas. Out on his bike one day, he watches four children sailing on the great, long lagoon that stretches between the mainland and the sandhills that edge the Southern Ocean, admiring their skill. A few days on, Ian meets three of the children on the road. When it rains, they shelter in the ruin of a stone shed, where he finds an old, blank exercise book and takes it home. That night he has a strange dream, and wakes to find himself sitting at his desk. He falls back into bed, but the next morning finds that there is now writing in the book which describes exactly the content of his dream: the journey to South Australia in the 1860s of a young Cornish boy, Jeremy Prior. Each night, Ian sleeps, dreams, wakes at the desk, and finds the events of the dream in the book the next morning, in the form of a diary. Meanwhile, he seems to have been adopted by pelicans.
Chapter 1
