Eli Silver is a pediatrician in Upstate New York who has accidentally let his only child die. The Sorensons are a childless couple who move from house to house, rebuilding old structures in an effort to rebuild their lives. Elizabeth Bean is a working woman-- unmarried, pregnant, and determined to bear her child. The lives of these people intersect, and eventually interlock, through circumstances that involve both the vagaries of bodily functions and emotional extremes, and the love of parents for children and of men and women for each other.

Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish émigré parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife's infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England's Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.

The long term story of a broken love affair between Anthony and Ellen beginning in 1944, and resuming in 1956, 1963 and 1980.

In artfully crafted interlocking flashbacks set against a vividly drawn scrim of New York City, Busch lets his hapless hero tell his story of the angst-driven complications of both licit and illicit love. It was Greenwich Village in the Sixties, and Zimmer was writing copy for a sleazy PR agency. Rhona was a voluptuous Nazi-hunting librarian who taught him introductory love and guilt and drove him into the arms of the tall blonde shiksa Lillian.