Determined to bring closure to his life-time goal, archaeologist David Norfolk is searching furiously for the wreck of a Portuguese ship he believes has lain buried for almost five centuries in the remote sandhills of southern New South Wales. Such a find would rewrite the history of Australia and at last solve the mystery of the lost continent of Java la Grande, depicted by the mapmakers of Dieppe in the early sixteenth century.

But when David unearths the body of a man murdered fifty years before, he stumbles upon another, more personal history - one that might eerily echo his own. An eccentric recluse named Kurt, who lies dying in a nearby shack, seems to know something of the corpse's identity and offers tantalizing bits of information about the ship David seeks. Desperate to keep the old man alive long enough to tell his secrets, David asks Claire, a former lover, who trained as a nurse, to join him at the site.

Together they follow Kurt into the maze of his memory, piecing together his incredible story of scholarly ambition, sexual passion, deceit and betrayal, stretching from the cloisters of 1930s academia to the momentous Fall of Singapore in 1942. But can the morphine-induced ramblings of a dying man be believed? And what does the illicit love affair that he describes from fifty years before have to do with the buried ship - or with David and Claire's rekindled romance?