It was a straightforward request. Take her gran home to her beloved Scotland. In the space of a few days, Elle loses her job and her home and faces moving back in with her parents - where she knows she'll hear a lot about how she is wasting her life, unlike her three siblings. Then Gran's will is read and everything changes.

Addy Loest is harbouring a secret - several, in fact. Dedicated overthinker, frockaholic and hard-partier, she’s been doing all she can to avoid the truth for quite some time. A working-class girl raised between the Port Kembla Steelworks and the surf of the Illawarra coast, Addy is a fish out of water at the prestigious University of Sydney. She’s also the child of German immigrants, and her broken-hearted widower dad won’t tell her anything about her family’s tragic past.

Sydney, 1948. Brilliant German surgeon, Hugo Winter, is dead, and his protégé, Lucy Brynne, is tasked with sorting his papers. Among them, Lucy finds glimpses of Hugo’s past that paint a disturbing picture of war and prejudice - a portrait of Australia she can barely recognise. That same week, an intriguing patient comes into her care on the orthopaedic ward at Sydney Hospital: one Mr Jim Cleary. Lucy’s experience as an army physiotherapist, as well as her own very personal knowledge of pain, tell her there’s more to this man’s fractured leg than meets the eye. 

Thisbe Chisholm wants to be a writer. It’s 2007, a time of digital revolution and skyrocketing property prices, but she’s an old-fashioned girl. She longs only to tell the stories written on her heart. While her best friends, Penny and Jane, and her darling boyfriend, John, seem set for stellar careers in their chosen fields, Thisbe works nights as a hostess at a glitzy harbourside Sydney club - a job she despises but has paid the rent for the last three years since university graduation. 

The whole of the harbour was touched with gold - the tops of the quiet waves, warehouse roofs, the bulging folds of sails at rest, the tips of seagull wings - giving him one sweeping glimpse of beauty just as he was leaving, a vision of things as they ought always to be just as they were not.... March, 1912. A sultry Indian summer hangs over the west coast of Australia and aboard the luxury steamship SS Koombana, three tales entwine.