December, 1937. In the course of her war with China, the armies of Imperial Japan attack and sack the city of Nanking. Caught up in the fighting are two young men, Lieutenant Jack Dawson of the Royal Navy, serving on board one of the British gunboats patrolling the Yangste-Kiang, and Lieutenant-Commander Hirada Tanawa, a pilot with the Imperial Japanese Navy. Out of the bloodshed and the savage destruction of the city a friendship begins – one which is to have tragic consequences.
Resumption traces the course of this friendship down to 10 December 1941, when the two men find themselves at war with each other. It tells of Jack Dawson — son of the World War I hero — and his unhappy marriage, his adventures and his love affairs... And it tells of Hirada Tanawa’s visit to England in 1938, and his successful wooing of Rear-Admiral Giles Dawson’s eldest daughter Georgiana — Jack Dawsons's cousin.
We witness the enthralling spiral of Georgiana's marriage and life in Japan, which plummets from happiness to sheer misery as she is caught up in the trauma of a nation bent on war, against her own people.
But, interwoven among scenes of bucolic country house England, espionage and tales of love in the Second World War, Resumption also tells the story of two navies – the British and Japanese – preparing themselves for the greatest of wars, and exploding into triumph and tragedy in the Gulf of Siam on that sunlit December day in 1941.