Prabir Suresh lives in paradise, a nine-year-old boy with an island all his own. Teranesia is his kingdom, shared only with his biologist parents and baby sister. The evolutionary puzzle of the butterflies that brought his family to the island barely touches Prabir, but when civil war breaks out across Indonesia, this paradise comes to a violent end.
The mystery of the butterflies remains unsolved, but nearly twenty years later reports begin to appear of strange new species of plants and animals being found throughout the region — species separated from their known cousins by recent, dramatic mutations that seem far too useful to have arisen by chance.
