Douglas Lockwood came to Jamaica to recover from the heartbreak of a messy divorce. But instead of peace he found passion, and three women who threatened to turn the island idyll into a summer storm . . .
The school at which Douglas has come to teach is perched on an isolated hilltop, and its pupils run wild while the staff are engaged in their own private wars. The headmaster's wife is trying to tempt him into an affair, but his heart lies with Judy, an air hostess he rescued from a plane crash. And in the background is Sylvia, an uncontrollable young girl who is madly in love with him and caught up in an adult world she doesn't understand.
A gorgeously cinematic novel, The Shadow and the Peak is a gripping story by the bestselling author of The World of Suzie Wong. It was filmed in 1958 as Passionate Summer, starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers.

Richard Mason was born near Manchester in 1919. He served in the RAF during the Second World War before taking a crash course in Japanese and becoming an interrogator of prisoners of war. His first novel, The Wind Cannot Read, which drew on these experiences, won the 1948 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde. Several of his following novels were also cinematised, most famously The World of Suzie Wong, about an artist's romance with a Hong Kong prostitute. His last novel, The Fever Tree, was published in 1962. Mason moved to Rome in the early 1970s and lived there until his death in 1997.