An Asian city suffers an extraordinary period of intense heat. It ceases to function normally. Young and old are dying; fevers and infections are rife; insects and deadly pests haunt the streets; businesses and schools close; computers crash; water is rationed. The city is silent apart from the wail of sirens. Even the beggars leave.Rin mourns for her infant son, dead from heat exhaustion. She manages an infamous restaurant called the Orca, celebrated for its rare seafood, including infant whale. One of a chain owned by the international Syndicate of the Shining Star, it hires its own fishing fleet to seek out the delicacies for which the restaurant is renowned.

Exclusive, frequented by politicians, officers of the armed services, high-ranking bureacrats, artists and the filthy rich, this is food as theatre, barbaric in its immorality. In the Canadian Bay of Fundy Right whales gather to feed before heading south in the autumn to mate. Their presence here is so continuous that they feature in the Mi'kmaq tribal legends. Eubalin, an adult male, his mate Oenone and their calf Oena arrive in Fundy. Their peace is shattered by the appearance of a whaling fleet. Many whales are slaughtered; Eubalin is injured. He tells his mate to flee to the south. Once healed, they will all meet again at the ancestral calving grounds in the Altamaha estuary off the coast of Georgia.

Some months later the Hooded Crow sets sail with a crew of misfits, a determined Captain and a secret mission. Crew members are uneasy about the voyage's true nature. The Captain only refers to a 'special catch.' They steam from Montevideo via the Gulf of Mexico to the Altamaha where they intend to kill neonate whale calves. On the way they meet with unseasonal storms, malevolent sea-birds and strange offshore miasmas that continually haunt them. The narrative then follows each strand of the story - Rina and the Orca, Eubalin and the whales, the Hooded Crow and its misfortunes - all set against the background of environmental harm. Rin, still unhinged by her son's death, suffers a neurasthenic breakdown and is hospitalised. There she comes to understand the Orca's crimes and plans a 'special' evening to punish its parons.

Meanwhile Eubalin drifts through northern oceans, accompanied by sea creatures and messenger birds in a silent community of being. Aware of his ancestors' predictions that the whales' continued existence will one day be compromsied, he journeys southwards to take action. At sea the Hooded Crow is gripped by mysterious forces - engines fail, instruments go awry, heavy seas take their toll, grey-green mists shroud the ship, crew members fall ill. In a powerful, arresting climax, Eubalin leads the whales back to Fundy, closely pursued by the Hood Crow and swirling mists. Finally the three stories converge in tragedy but to some extent with hope recovered. Through human and animal characters caught up in a maelstrom of environmental quantities and forces which they can neither dominate nor control, the novel explores the most pressing of early twenty-first century discourses - our ill-considered transformation of nature, biodiversity loss and the imperilment of the planet's life-sustaining processes, rendered all the more immediate through the vector of golbal climate change. The novel attempts to deconstruct the modern view of nature as an all-providing, limitless storehouse for our benefit alone and an all-consuming waste disposal unit. It proposes a new form of relationship where life ultimately depends on life itself rather than on technological brilliance or the global economy, life as something vital but precarious, a web rather than a hierarchy, a thing of the senses rather than a wind-up mechanism, finally the possibility that one day nature herself may fight back.