In 2024, Jae-won is a Korean-Canadian NATO psychiatrist in Brussels, forty-eight days from a breakdown he doesn’t recognize as one. When an anonymous package arrives—coordinates, a photograph, a paper trail pointing to the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia—he follows it. His parents disappeared in a plane crash there thirty years ago. He has believed them dead. They are not.

The novel moves on two timelines. In the present, today, Jae-won travels north through volcanic terrain with Kira, an indigenous Itelmen guide who knows more than she discloses, trying to find out what happened to his parents. Jae-won grapples with dissociation, a word he has diagnosed in others for twenty years without recognizing it in himself.

In the past, thirty years ago, his mother Soon-yi—a Korean-Canadian journalist—survives the crash and chooses not to return. She has found a community of Russian indigenous people whose continuous presence in an unmapped valley is about to be erased by a Russian extraction company. She spends thirty years building the legal and ethnobotanical record that will protect them. This is the record Jae-won is walking toward.

The novel straddles the tension between Nobel winner Han Kang’s attention to the body as a site of historical memory and Michael Ondaatje’s rendering of people shaped by rupture. It is set in the indigenous territories of the Pacific Rim.