Affection
Affection \af*fect”tion\, n: 1. Kind feeling; love; tender attachment. 2. Disease; a morbid or abnormal state of body or mind; malady.
Townsville, 1900: At the end of a sweltering North Queensland summer, a steamer arrives in this tropical outpost carrying 52 passengers and a case of the plague.
Courtesy Fourth Estate
In this frontier town most people are too busy to be bothered with any damned foreign disease. Colonial Queensland is on the cusp of a new century and a new nation. The north is ruled by men with empires and railway lines to build. The passengers and crew of the SS Cintra are quarantined on an island and ignored.
A worried Queensland Government dispatches Dr Alfred Jefferis Turner – small, refined and immaculately dressed – to assess the situation. Armed with a microscope, a butterfly net and a dangerous habit of speaking his mind, Turner tries to prepare Townsville for the worst. His ally is Dr Linford Row, a man who has come North to escape his past.
When Dr Row delivers a letter from a quarantined man to his hauntingly beautiful wife, he ensnares himself and the eccentric Dr Turner in a tightening net of scandal and fear.