Surfacing follows the story of an unnamed narrator as she travels back to Quebec to search for her father. Having not been there for a few years, she returns with her boyfriend, Joe, and her friends, Anna and David, who are married to each other. On the way, they encounter one of her father’s friends, Paul, and he tells them that he has no information on her father’s whereabouts and that he hasn’t been seen in a long time. The group is introduced to Evans, their guide, who takes them to the narrator’s father’s island; this is where she and her brother, who almost drowned, grew up. Once there, she searches for clues and becomes sure that he is still alive (if he is dead, then both her parents are gone, as her mother died from an illness years before).
During her time on the island, the narrator also works at her career as a freelance illustrator, currently creating artwork for a book of fairy tales, although she is too preoccupied with her father’s disappearance to focus properly. As the novel progresses, we begin to uncover more about David and Anna, observing their tumultuous relationship. David is often insulting to Anna and tells her what to do, such as demanding she wears makeup. The narrator describes how he is a womanizer and how it makes her uncomfortable to see Anna treated in that way.
On a blueberry-picking trip, Joe surprisingly proposes to the narrator, but she turns him down and tells him about her previous relationship where she left her husband and child. He is upset and acts sullen and cold in the aftermath of her refusal.
Paul arrives with an American named Malstrom, who is a member of a Detroit wildlife agency. He wants to purchase the land, but the narrator turns down his offer. Believing that her father is still alive, she tells this to Paul, who is doubtful.
While searching through her father’s belongings for clues of his whereabouts, the narrator comes across a map with marked locations where her father was planning on carrying out research on Indian wall paintings. The whole group goes on a camping trip to see the paintings, and as they set off, they find a dead heron hanging from a tree; David decides he has to film it because he is making a film called Random Samples. The heron has a haunting effect on the narrator, who cannot stop thinking about it.
On the trip, we begin to see the dark side of Anna and David’s relationship as Anna reveals to the narrator that David will be angry she has forgotten her makeup. The group visits one of the sites on the map, but there are no wall paintings and the narrator is disappointed. As they travel to the next site they encounter a group of Americans with a boat brandishing the American flag. However, on closer inspection, the narrator discovers they are actually Canadians and the flag is only a sticker. We find out they are the ones who killed the heron, and because of this the narrator describes them as Americans.
The narrator discovers that the wall paintings are under the lake. David maliciously teases Anna, humiliating her by demanding she take her clothes off for his film project. Anna tells the narrator David is unfaithful to her and she is unhappy. The narrator later asks David why he is horrible to Anna, and he says he does it because she often cheats on him.
To see the paintings, the narrator dives down into the lake. On one dive, she sees something that causes her to scream and quickly come back to the surface. Joe had followed her to the lake and angrily demands to know what she was doing down there. She doesn’t respond to him and is in a sort of trance, coming to the realization that what she saw floating below was in fact her aborted baby. The narrator admits to herself that she made up some of the earlier things in her life that she had asserted as true—she was never married to the man she claimed was her husband, and she never had a baby because the man, with whom she was having an affair because he was already married, had her get an abortion. She had thought the images of drowning in her memory were of her brother, but in actuality they were of her unborn child.
The narrator starts believing that her father marked the sites on the map purposefully. She decides to find them all and thank the gods for giving her, what she believes is, “the power.” While in this mentally vulnerable state, Joe reaches out to her a number of times, but she completely disregards him. Joe’s belief that he has power over the narrator leads him to try to rape her. He stops when she insists it will make her pregnant.
Soon after, David approaches the narrator and tries to seduce her, stating that Anna and Joe are having an affair. The narrator does not give in to his advances. When Anna hears of the narrator’s rejection of David, it causes her to feel guilty and she is cruel to the narrator instead of her husband. The friends’ relationships remain frayed.
A police officer arrives and talks to David, Anna, and Joe while the narrator watches from a distance. David breaks the news that the narrator’s father is dead, and they have found his body. She refuses to believe this, as she is still certain he is alive. In her manic state, she decides that she has forgiven Joe for cheating on her and the two have sex. The narrator is certain she has conceived a child from this encounter.
With the news of her father’s death, the narrator and her friends decide to go home. Instead of going with them, the narrator abandons them. She takes David’s film and destroys it and leaves by boat. Now she is alone on the island and she begins to become more unhinged as she destroys her own artwork, the furnishings of the cabin, and envisions her dead parents. She abandons her clothes, begins eating plants, and lives in a burrow.
Eventually, the narrator begins to recover from her madness and realizes that she actually loves Joe and wants to have her child with him. Paul returns with Joe to look for her and the narrator plans to reunite with him. The novel ends with the narrator looking out at Joe, ready for him to find her.
