When Marian's mother dies, she is left confronting the chaotic detritus of a life obsessively devoted to art. She has left it too late to ask the crucial questions about scenes confusedly remembered from her childhood, and above all about the identity of her own father. Out of the hundreds of paintings in her mother's studio, one, a portrait of a young man, is inscribed ‘For Marian’. Is this her father? And who was he?

Marian's search takes her to St Ives. In the closeknit Cornish town where communities of fisherfolk and artists have coexisted for many years, she learns of a tragedy which is intrinsically tied up with her father's life. Over fifty years before, the St Ives lifeboat went down with all hands bar one. Marian must delve deep into the past to discover the identity of a man she never knew, and in so doing confront the demons which have tortured her own adult life.