On a rainy afternoon in 1934, Vera Lowinger Drew waits at a Vancouver port for her grandfather’s ship to dock. The motherless girl is the last of a pearling dynasty. For generations the men in her family have abandoned their women to plunder riches on the ocean floors of the South Seas. But today James Lowinger comes ashore for what will be the last time, with a young Japanese woman on his arm. Fate brings Vera back into the dangerous and beautiful world of the pearl, on the shores of a small Japanese island. There Vera comes to womanhood among the ama, women divers who teach her their secret art.