The Deep Field introduces us to a brilliant young photographer named Anna Frazier, whose latest project is a photographic study of shell fossils called ammonites. At a museum in Sydney she meets Seth La Marque, a blind paleontologist who senses that Anna is hiding something from her past that has wounded her and made her shut down her emotions. Slowly, as they become friends and then lovers, Anna reveals her tumultuous and obsessive love affair with a Hong Kong-based financier and the painful ending that left her drained and empty. At the same time, her twin brother, Daniel, disappeared in China during a period of incredible upheaval and chaos, and Anna feels her life is on hold until she can find him.

Set just over a decade from now, The Deep Field portrays a world very much like the present, yet subtly and unsettlingly different. At once steely and compassionate, it weaves elements of photography, science, and philosophy into a meditation on love, time, and loss.