It's 2020 and an Englishwoman is journeying with her husband and young daughter to the white rock of San Blas off the coast of Mexico, to give thanks for the birth of their child, even as her faith in her marriage - and the future itself - is unravelling. It is 1969 and a singer, on the run from the law, from his rabid fans and from an America burning with the fever of the Vietnam War, washes up in a hotel at the edge of Mexico, hoping to lose - and maybe find - himself. In the first years of the Twentieth Century, a girl and her sister are torn from their homeland and taken by force to the coast. As their future is recast in the name of progress and power, she turns to the stories of her people to keep them alive. And in 1775 a young Lieutenant of the Spanish line, preparing to set sail from the White Rock to continue the conquest of the Pacific coast, appears to lose his grip on reality, with far-reaching and fatal consequences ...