Sixteen-year-old Philip Hutton feels alienated from the Chinese and British cultures that rule his community, until he forms an unexpected friendship with a Japanese diplomat who is renting an island from Philip's father, but as World War II erupts around him, Philip slowly realizes his new friend is a Japanese spy.

The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When "Willie" Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his...