When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a summer job tutoring T.J.Callahan at his family's holiday home in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation. T.J. is almost seventeen and as if having had cancer wasn't bad enough, he now has to spend his first summer in remission with his family - and a pile of overdue essays - instead of his friends. Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Marooned on an uninhabited island, Anna and T.J. work together to obtain water, food, fire and shelter, but as the days turn to weeks, then months and, finally, years, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man...