In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient...

A New York novelist in search of a story becomes involved in the mystery of who stole the large brass cross that hung behind the altar of St. Timothy's Episcopal church in Manhattan and installed it on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side.

A successful suburbanite commuter Howard Wakefield takes a perverse detour from family life: He vanishes without a trace. Hidden in the attic of his carriage house garage, surviving by scavenging at night, Howard secretly observes the lives of his wife and children and neighbors. Wakefield becomes a fraught meditation on marriage and identity, as Howard slowly realizes that he has not in fact left his family, he has left himself.