Cat Munro's safe, carefully-controlled world as a corporate lawyer is disintegrating, and she is diagnosed with panic disorder just before her fortieth birthday. In a last-ditch attempt to claw back control, she faces up to her greatest fear of all: she decides to learn to fly. As she struggles, high above the Arizona desert, to let go of old memories and the anxieties that have always held her back, Cat faces a choice: should she try to piece her comfortable old life back together again, or should she give in to the increasingly urgent compulsion to throw it all away? Several thousand miles away on the north-west coast of Scotland, Cat's mother Laura faces retirement and a growing sense of failure and futility. Alone for the first time in her life, she is forced to face the memories of her violent and abusive marriage, the alcoholism that followed, and her resulting fragile relationship with Cat. But then she joins the local storytelling circle. And as she becomes attuned to the myth-laden, watery landscape around her, she begins to reconstruct the story of her own life ...