During one of his several adventurous voyages, an Englishman becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck and lives for thirty years on a desert island before being rescued.
Daniel, the adopted son of an English aristocrat, meets Mordecai, an ailing Jewish philosopher and his sister, Mirah, and begins to discover the secrets behind his own parentage.
Several voices narrate this stylistic murder mystery and love story in which a sixteenth-century sultan in Istanbul orders a noted artist, Enishte Effendi, to create a book illustrated in the Western style, which is considered blasphemous in the Islamic world--a dangerous assignment that results in the mysterious death of one of Enishte's chosen gilders.
A history teacher besieged by a personal crisis and the "phasing out" of his teaching job abandons his lessons to relate tales of Fenland and his family.
