Following the death of his parents in a car crash, eleven-year-old Alex Dove is torn from his life on a remote farm in Tasmania & sent to school in Engl&. When he returns to Australia twelve years later, the timeless beauty of the land & his encounter with a young woman whose own life has been marked by tragedy, persuade him to stay. They marry, & he finds himself drawn into the eccentric, often hilarious dynamics of island life.
Longing for children, the couple open their home to a disquieting guest, a teenage castaway, whose presence in their home begins to unravel their tenuously forged happiness.