Not every book needs a story and Julia Whitty's latest, The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific, is a master class in what the filmmaker cum author describes as creative non-fiction.
If you're looking for a book cataloguing man's destructive impact on a part of our natural world that ends with a neat conclusion, then this is not for you.
'It's truly deeply plotless and that's one of the joys of it, for people that like it,' Whitty explains from her home in Sonoma County in California's wine country.
'It meanders the way you meander in a wilderness without a track. For people who like it, it is like entering another world. It's like a fantasy world almost.'
The action takes place in the South Pacific, where Whitty spent time snorkelling and scuba-diving while making a documentary. The first chapter, Rangiroa, focuses on the underwater world; the second, Funafuti, on the people who live on the coral atolls; the third, Mo'orea, on the immediate effects of modernisation and globalisation on these remote places.
A spiritual person, Whitty offers sculpted descriptions interlaced with thoughts on eastern philosophies such as Jainism and Buddhism, and literary epics including the I Ching, the Upanishads and the Mahabharata. The book also draws on science to highlight the damage that the practices of the modern world are having on just one-tenth of one per cent of the Earth's surface.
'Coral reefs are powerful arbiters of life both in the sea and on the land,' Whitty writes. 'The oceans they help stock are the chemical engine driving the planet, stabilising our climate, refreshing the air we breathe, making the rain that feeds the rivers and lakes, which water the crops upon which we depend. This water world and its most fertile and fragile edge, the coral reefs, are the continuing cradle of life on Earth.'