It’s March 1980, and Carol Girard and her husband are living an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child, and though Carol is struggling with the challenges of new motherhood, her future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: an inexplicable flickering of light in the sky, which is ultimately determined to be communication from intelligent life on another planet. As humanity reels from a shifting understanding of its place in the universe, we follow the stories of the Girard family: Carol, whose fascination with this other life sparks a desperate search for spiritual meaning; Michael, her loyal son, who finds solace not in the stars above his head but in the ground beneath his feet; and Ro, Carol’s bright and ambitious daughter, whose childhood goal to work in interstellar communication will evolve into something far grander.

Twelve contestants on a reality TV show are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens. But how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made? When one of the contestants stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game. But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways --- and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.