Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician turned schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that has gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’t exactly what his employers said they were --- and, complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies --- and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.

Rendered paraplegic after a traumatic event four years ago, Cameron Harris has been living his new existence alongside his sister, Tanya, in a neighborhood where only half the houses made it through Katrina. One hot afternoon, as Cameron sits waiting for Tanya during their daily run to a convenience store, he suddenly and inexplicably rises up and out of his wheelchair. In the aftermath of this “miracle,” Cameron finds himself a celebrity at the center of a contentious debate about what’s taken place. And when scientists, journalists and a Vatican investigator start digging, Cameron’s deepest secrets become increasingly endangered. Was Cameron’s recovery a genuine miracle, or a medical breakthrough?

As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, readers are telescoped into three different worlds in various states of disrepair --- a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included.