At the age of seven, in a London workhouse, newly orphaned James meets ten-year-old Peter. Mysterious, mercurial, thoughtless to the point of cruelty, Peter nonetheless takes a liking to James. The two forge a strange friendship, bound together by their shared love of stories—stories of a magical island called Neverland, where they adventure as the pirate James Hook and the child-king Peter Pan. But one fateful night, Peter vanishes from his bed, and in the morning, James is found lying alone and broken in the courtyard outside. Only James saw Peter fly from the workhouse roof in pursuit of a star, and nobody but James believes that the star was a fairy.

Over twenty years later, on the deck of a whaling ship in the frozen wastes of the Arctic, First Mate James Hook sees the same star again.

James's obsession with finding his childhood friend will lead him to mutiny and murder, beyond the edges of the world, and finally to an island that shouldn't exist. But neither Neverland nor Peter are what they appear. A new story is about to begin, and not all stories have happy endings.

Contains mature themes.