Le fils du dragon is a rich and colorful yarn founded on the idea of various random imaginary and influential encounters between Joseph Conrad and Arthur Rimbaud on the high seas. As they embark on ships full of contraband, coffee, orchids, and coal, their aimless pursuits of adventure follow the trade winds of the 19th Century from the newly important Marseilles to Cape Horn, from Antarctica, and Singapore to Java and Mali. Both writers dreamed of adventure, and here they not only live their dreams, but their dreams are abetted by their young and impressionable sailor friend Victor, aka, The Dragon.

The story opens as the Dragon’s wife back home in Nantes opens that most dreaded of letters: the one announcing the death at sea of her husband. Her young son Rodolph never would forget the scream that reaches his bedroom. At the age of 15, Rodolph sets out on the adventure of his life: retracing the footsteps of The Dragon, to separate fiction from reality and discover for himself what lured his father so far from home. His path also crosses that of Rimbaud, older now, and embittered by experience, no longer writing poetry. With luck and willingness to work hard he earns his passage on Eastward-bound ships. What he will find out will change him forever, opening the floodgates of pleasure and pain, or life.