Mattie Fiona Blue, recently widowed and filled with grief, spins a tale of her beloved husband Nick - his birth, his love of the sea, his haunted fear of drowning, their romantic and devoted love for each other, and his death - a death always, as it seemed, foretold by family legend. While mourning Nick, Mattie tells us of her own life as she journeys from the loneliness of a broken home and a disapproving mother to the chaotic, mythic, abundant sphere of the sprawling Greek-American Blue family, whose ties to the sea extend across generations, continents and time.
