The Sea on Our Skin is set on an island in the South Pacific, remote from everywhere and everything, including modern life.

Outwardly a paradise, the small island community revolves around family with their traditional lives defined by the sea: some are securely held by it while others use it as a means of escape.

Ioane and Amalia are opposites in every way - Amalia, happy to be an island wife, and her husband Ioane, always compelled to leave. Their stories, both painful and loving, and the stories of their children are full of the rhythms of island life and the smell and sound of the sea as paradise begins to change...

You don't know anything about an island, my father said, unless you can feel the movement of the sea around it. It's where people find their souls, though they don't all know it . . .