A sweeping historical saga and the story of a lost child, from the author of the bestselling View from the Beach.



Two-year-old Jamie was lost in Victoria's Dandenong Ranges, presumed dead. But Jamie is not dead. Found by itinerant acrobats Bruce and Marge Mandale, he accompanies them on their travels throughout Australia. When he is ten he discovers the Cloud Forest, an area of temperate rainforest on the summit of Mount Gang Gang in tropical North Queensland.



The Cloud Forest is a place of haunting beauty, but for Jamie it is far more than that. It is the Realm of Ultimate Desire, that place for which humanity longs and spends its life seeking. In it resides the dignity of the human spirit which we betray only at the cost of our own self-destruction.



The forest weaves its lingering spell over the child and his descendants. A hundred years later another child enters the Cloud Forest and, through her actions, brings the saga to its conclusion.