Ayoung New Zealand nursing student is lunching in her college café in 1975 when an unknown 'Black man with a halo of corkscrew curls' sits uninvited next to her. Within a year, she marries the stranger in a traditional Solomon Islands' ceremony near the beach on which he was born, midway through his mother's four-hour walk to the clinic. Naked children and bare-breasted women greet the couple's arrival by canoe. She is the sole European at her wedding. Her only present is a shell. She discovers their home is a fibreboard house perched on stilts in a sea of mud on a muddy road. They bathe in a stream and fetch water from the river. The sea is the toilet. For most of the next forty