Nautical archaeologist Christina Alvarez searches the Caribbean for her ancestor's sunken treasure ship, but as she battles for the assistance of her only help, Mitch Crawford, she leads them to an even greater treasure.

In a rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ana Magdalena Bach has been happily married for 27 years, and yet, every August, she travels by ferry to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.

After a boating accident takes her beautiful singing and speaking voice from her, Elyse d'Abreau, the youngest of six sisters, leaves her home in Tobago to stay in an Oregon seaside town where Christian Kane, a notorious playboy, challenges her to express herself and to overcome her fear of the sea.