Allen Carmichael has been living on the edges of society since returning from Viet Nam. He has built himself a reputation by rescuing women and children from abusive relationships, but now, at 50, he is set to retire. When he takes one final case, though, things go disastrously wrong, and both Allen and the boy he is trying to save find themselves on the run from a very dangerous foe.

Pearl gradually comes to understand her mother Jiang Weili (Winnie) as a heroic survivor, not a troublesome anachronism, as they begin to reveal secrets about themselves to one another. Winnie tells the story of how she escaped a horrible marriage to a cowardly fighter pilot in the Sino-Japanese war and how he may or may not be Pearl's father. Meanwhile Pearl gathers the strength confide her great secret, that she has multiple sclerosis, to her mother.

The unusual main characters in this debut novel are a family of freed black slaves who hold slaves themselves. As the novel tells the stories of former slave Henry Townsend, his wife Caldonia, a man who hunts runaways for a living, and the various slaves on Henry's Virginia farm, a picture emerges of pre-Civil War America and the complexities of race, responsibility, and the institution of slavery. As the author stated in a Publishers Weekly interview: "I was trying to find out how these people survived in these horrifying conditions....I want to write about the things that helped us to survive: the love, grace, intelligence and strength of us as a people."