Is there another writer in the English-speaking world more distinctive and adventurous than John Buchan? A foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, Buchan has in the last 12 years produced A Parish of Rich Women, which contrasted the drug-addled English upper crust and the citizens of war-torn Beirut and which won the Whitbread Prize in 1984, and The Golden Plough, an intricate and puzzling Cold War thriller, as well as two other novels. His latest work is almost too dense and ambitious to summarize: it involves a Wall Street takeover specialist whose devotion to keeping a Glasgow textile mill open reveals some dreadful secrets from her own past. It also involves a bankrupt airline operating commercial flights to Antarctica, a massive oil spill, an encounter with 41,000 penguins, insurance scandals, and the descendant of an 18th-century explorer. All of this is related by a detached first-person narrator who may or may not have any relation to the novel"s characters. Buchan"s book is romance in the grandest sense.