Set in the U.S. before the Civil War, the novel follows African American characters whose private relationships and household lives intersect with the broader realities of slavery and escape.

Four very different people converge in an Italian villa during the later stages of World War II: a severely burned, anonymous patient; the Canadian nurse who tends him; a Sikh sapper; and a Canadian thief.

Set during the First World War, the novel follows officers treated for shell shock at a military psychiatric hospital. The plot focuses on their therapy, conversations, and struggles to reconcile wartime experiences with civilian identities while clinicians and fellow patients negotiate guilt, duty, and recovery.

A Jesuit-led mission makes contact with an alien civilization and returns with consequences that force survivors to reckon with faith, morality, and trauma. The novel frames its central pressure around human responses—religious, ethical, and personal—to an otherworldly meeting and the costs that follow.