With­in days Mar­i­lyn los­es her par­ents to can­cer and a ter­ror­ist bomb­ing. As she mourns, she traces her increas­ing­ly frag­ile sense of life to her par­ents’ anx­ious brand of love and sur­vivor­ship — byprod­ucts of their Euro­pean Jew­ish descent. When Mar­i­lyn takes up under­wa­ter div­ing, the obses­sive risk-tak­er in her emerges as she uncov­ers a realm of sub­lime rap­ture and awe — a rea­son to live. Div­ing deep and long she encoun­ters hid­den aspects of her iden­ti­ty near­ly extinct. Return­ing each time to the sur­face, she believes her­self freed from the past’s com­plex emo­tion­al lega­cies. Until a close call div­ing inside a ship­wreck caus­es her to quit. But when her best friend dies while explor­ing an under­wa­ter cave with Marilyn’s hus­band she takes up div­ing again to hon­or — and out­do — her late friend. Mar­i­lyn then drags her hus­band with her as she increas­ing­ly push­es her­self far past her lim­its endan­ger­ing them both. This grip­ping nov­el explores the tan­gled lives of three dri­ven and flawed peo­ple, bound and pro­pelled and ulti­mate­ly unrav­eled by desire loss and guilt.