The horizon is a blue streak across the pale sea, giving the trick of land close enough to sail to. Pearl imagines a packet ship surging to another world with two passengers safe in the bows, their hands joined together.

It is 1880 in Cornwall. Pearl, Nicholas, and Jack play among the fishing boats of Skommow Bay, not understanding the undercurrents beneath their games. Nine years later, Nicholas, keen for the fishing industry and society as a whole to progress, makes a decision that will affect all of their lives forever. Told from the point of a view of an aging Pearl, succumbing to dementia in 1936, this moving novel jumps back and forth through time as Pearl's own memory does and explores topics such as the tension between individual will and the pressure to conform to societal norms, love and tragedy, and the ripple effects of a dying industry. The story is set against the scenic backdrop of Cornwall as well as the late-19th-century riots over the observance of the Sabbath in the fishing industry, and serves as a tremendously accurate snapshot of a particular moment in time and a meditation on the universal themes of love and loss.