When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged older half-sister, to help pick up the pieces. This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. The Greys have been avoiding each other for a dozen years. Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station, a wild and isolated spot off the Gulf Coast. Here, their father's fatalistic colleagues, the Reversalists, obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare sea duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse and humanity's best days are behind us. On an island which is always looking backward, it's impossible for the siblings to ignore their past. Stuck together in the close quarters of their island stilt-house and provoked by the absurd antics of the remaining Reversalists, Elsa and Nolan fear that years of family secrecy and blame may ruin them all over again. As the Greys urgently trek across the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father's final obsession, they begin to fear they were their father's first evidence that the future held no hope.
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