After ministering to fallen women in Victorian London, Evelyn has suffered a nervous breakdown & finds herself treated by the Water Doctors in the imposing Wakewater House, a hydropathy sanatorium. Years later, Wakewater House is renovated into modern apartments & Kirsten moves in, fresh from a break up & eager for the restorative calm of the Thames. But her archivist neighbour, Manon, fills her head with the river`s murky past & with those men of science & art who were obsessed with the drowned women who were washed up on its banks. As Kirsten learns more about Wakewater`s secrets, she becomes haunted by a solitary figure in the river & increasingly desperate to understand what the water wants from her.