For Daniel Serraz, born on a ferry in the Straits of Malacca, orphaned two years later when his parents are lost at sea, the world beneath the waves holds an irresistible fascination.

Raised in Geneva by his hydrophobic grandmother, his boyish imagination stirred by the local pet-shop's aquaria, Daniel free-floats with life's currents into a career in insurance and marriage to Japanese interpreter Kozue. But ominous truths are re-surfacing, bound up with the legend of his whale-hunter great-grandfather and his parents' disappearance off the Indonesian coast. When calamity scars his marriage and devastates his health, at the risk of his own survival, Daniel pursues his sea-borne destiny to the far-flung island of Lefó, where whales are still hunted by century-old methods and native superstition tells of a mythical makhluk istimewa, an 'extraordinary creature' still inhabiting the surrounding seas.