Outcast from society, his health - and heart - broken, the anguished figure of K paces the rooms of his great house, pausing to scribble furiously at a lectern...Only Victor knows that beneath K's public guise as an idle dilettante, lies a genius who has been fired by an unholy secret into creating a new kind of philosophy, where thought is passionately infused with personal experience. Based on the life of the Danish thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, who asserted that when he died 'there will not be found one single word to indicate what my life was really about', The Stormy Petrel is precisely the inside story of what his life is about - an investigation into a soul torn between natural love and a supernatural vocation, which leads inexorably to the attack that makes his name anathema for a hundred years.