Lucretia is the teenaged daughter of a West Australian cray-fisherman and pearl farmer. She "learns to love in the same way a child learn words, indescribable until another fills the space one never acknowledged". In her fifteenth year, she meets a German deckhand desperate to escape the confines of cultural and linguistic boundaries, a young man, who, with his woodworking brother Michel, the saxophone-loving, weed-smoking Bill, and Lucretia's smaller and infinitely wise cousins, Arlo and Edie, create a reality so far from the mainland, it becomes a utopia covered in fish blood and Portuguese legends.