In Search of the Blue Duck, set during the mid-1980s, mainly in Australia and New Zealand, tells the story of a young man finding his way in the wider world after discovering his unsuitability to the privileged New York life he has been brought up to lead.

Passing up an opportunity to linger in Fiji, he heads to New Zealand where he happens upon a wild young British woman from a background as limited in its way as his own. Unlike him, however, she has learned to pursue what she christens "the Blue Duck-- Adventure" and sets out to show him how to do likewise.

As they work and travel, living on next to nothing, hiking and hitching rides across remote regions of New Zealand and Australia, they come to know one another better than they have anybody else. However, it becomes clear, as they wend their way through Indonesia, that their differences are bound to bring their idyll to an end.

Yet, this highly unusual tale of travel and romance is also much more than that, regularly moving out of narrative mode into exposition of and meditation upon whatever its omnivorously curious author encounters along his way, from the extinction of Aboriginal languages to the evolution of cardboard box manufacture.