"Western Australia, 1886. After months at sea, a slow boat makes its passage from London to the shores of Bannin Bay. The sea is a shocking blue, and gulls float above battered mangrove jetties. From the deck, young Eliza Brightwell and her family eye their strange new home. Here is an unforgiving land where fortune sits patiently at the bottom of the ocean. A land where pearl shells bloom to the size of soup plates. Where men are coaxed into unthinkable...

A nineteen year old Japanese pearl diver discovers she has leprosy. She knows that the shame attached to it is inescapable: rejection by her family and exile. No more than two months elapse before authorities send her off to a leprosarium on the island of Nagashima where she is instructed to forget her past, to strike her name from the family register, and ordered to choose a new name.