Marina is a photojournalist at the top of her career when she is caught up in a massacre in Bosnia. Surviving only at the sacrifice of her friend's life, Marina plunges into years of despair, until finally, she decides to leap to her death off the back of a ship traveling the South Pacific. Instead of dying, she is swept up and rescued by a giant sea turtle that takes her to her nesting ground. She awakens on the beach days later, covered with third-degree burns from the sun. A beautiful woman appears and wraps her from head to toe in giant palm fronds. Each day the woman reappears, renews the dressing, and seems to age, until it is an old crone who whispers to Marina, ""You must cross the humpbacked mountain of Turtle Island to be reborn."" So begins Marina's odyssey acrosss the interior of the island, where she meets the lover who teaches her to reclaim her lost life and the wandering woman who shows her how to carry sanctuary with her wherever she goes, and she finally stumbles onto the beach on the other side, where she discovers, once and for all, herself.