Danaé Poussin lives on the shores of Ys, an island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, where only those inside the high fortified walls of the city are safe from the great equinoctial tides. Citizens live a life of luxury, but shore-dwellers are subject to the sea's instability, continuously rebuilding while hoping they might be judged Issois enough to gain citizenship. Possessing the rare gift of knowing how to swim, the orphaned Danaé seems born for the waves but longs for life within the walls. Flowing between shore, city, and sea, she navigates the rocky possibilities for women, from salter to thief to aristocrat to sailor's wife, learning to steer through the sexist and classist indignities of the calm before a revolutionary storm.

Sailors Can't Swim is a squall of a novel - a bildungsroman inside a maritime fairytale inside a history lesson for an alternate eighteenth century. It reflects our own era, exposing the meanness of meritocracy and the arbitrariness of citizenship in a place where everything belonging to someone belonged to someone else first.