The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, which takes them from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime.

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father Serk take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes on the beach hours later, she is soaked to the skin and her father is missing, probably drowned.

This sudden event shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.