When a controversial scientist drowns while investigating his theories about evolution moving in reverse, his estranged adult children reunite to settle their late father's affairs while trying to understand the research he abandoned them to pursue. Nolan Grey and his estranged half-sister, Elsa, are trying to pick up the pieces when their father, a once-prominent biologist, drowns off Leap's Island. They travel to their father's field station, a wild and isolated spot off the Gulf Coast. Here their father's fatalistic colleagues, the Reversalists, obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare sea duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse and humanity's best days are behind us. Stuck together in close quarters and provoked by the absurd antics of the Reversalists, Elsa and Nolan begin to fear that they were their father's first evidence that the future held no hope. -- adapted from jacket