Two men separated by six centuries, and yet conjoined over the way their lives have played out and a lost map.

Ricard Hogarth is a respected professor at Durham specialising in the history of cartography, and in particular, early Turkish maps and the charts and portolans of Piri Reis. He has risen through the ranks from his working class roots to be an internationally renowned scholar. And yet, he is not really comfortable in the academic milieu he has landed in. His life is turned around when he meets a young Australian post grad student, and they fall in love. His life is shattered when she suddenly disappears for no reason he can fathom. A little later, he has a catastrophic breakdown in front of his students and leaves the university to live on a boat on the canals in the south of France, an exile by choice in a place where no one knows where he is or of his past life. Until he is tracked down by an enigmatic young man to validate a lost map by Piri Reis.

Piri Reis has risen through the ranks under his uncle Kemal Reis to become an esteemed captain in the Ottoman navy. But his temperament is not for the blood and gore of battle, but to be left in peace to draw his maps and work on his Book of the Sea. Somehow, he has to navigate his way through the intrigues and wiles of the Ottoman court without losing his head as sultans come and go. To his dismay, the viziers keep sending him off on naval missions when he would rather be in his study in Gelibolu at the top of the Dardanelles.

This book intersperses the life of Ricard and the life of Piri Reis six centuries earlier. They are not the same men, but they are caught up in a life not entirely of their own making, and each of them needs to struggle with the demons that invest their lives.