It is 1914‎,‎ and Thomas Maggs‎,‎ the son of the local publican‎,‎ lives with his parents and sister in a village on the Suffolk coast‎.‎ He is the youngest child‎,‎ and the only son surviving‎.‎ Life is quiet ‎- shaped by the seasons‎,‎ fishing and farming‎,‎ the summer visitors‎,‎ and the girls who come down from the Highlands every year to gut and pack the herring‎.‎ Then one day a mysterious Scotsman arrives‎.‎ To Thomas he looks for all the world like a detective‎,‎ in his black cape and hat of felted wool‎,‎ and the way he puffs on his pipe as if he‎'‎s Sherlock Holmes‎.‎ Mac is what the locals call him when they whisper about him in the Inn‎.‎ And whisper they do‎,‎ for he sets off on his walks at unlikely hours‎,‎ and stops to examine the humblest flowers‎.‎ He is seen on the beach‎,‎ staring out across the waves as if he‎'‎s searching for clues‎.‎ But Mac isn‎'‎t a detective‎,‎ he‎'‎s the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh‎,‎ and together with his red haired artist wife‎,‎ they soon become a source of fascination and wonder to Thomas Yet just as Thomas and Mac‎'‎s friendship begins to blossom‎,‎ war with Germany is declared‎.‎ The summer guests flee and are replaced by regiments of soldiers on their way to Belgium‎,‎ and as the brutality of war weighs increasingly heavily on this coastal community‎,‎ they become more suspicious of Mac and his curious behaviour‎.‎‎.‎‎.‎In this tender and compelling story of an unlikely friendship‎,‎ Esther Freud paints a vivid portrait of a home front community during the First World War‎,‎ and of a man who was one of the most brilliant and misunderstood artists of his generation‎.‎ It is her most beautiful and masterful work‎.‎