One chilly dawn in the year 1912 a fisherman finds a mysterious, beautiful infant floating on an ice floe in the North Atlantic. This is her story.
The inhabitants of the poor Newfoundland fishing village of Drook believe that Aurora, with her shock of white hair and eyes of different colours, is a changeling. Her very survival shows that her life is charmed. As she grows up her adoptive family perceives the many ways in which Aurora's nature deviates from theirs.
She marries a lighthouse keeper and has two children, both named after shipwrecks, but it is only after they are grown and married, and she is an old woman, that the mystery of Aurora's origins - and of her children's variant temperaments - is solved.
