Ned Ayres has never wanted anything but a newspaper career. His defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president’s daughter and the father of two children, once served six years in Joliet. The story runs, and Ned offers no resistance to his publisher’s argument that the public has a right to know. The consequences, swift and shocking, haunt him throughout a long career until eventually, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-Kennedy-era Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to the question of privacy and its many violations.

Harry Sanders is a young foreign service officer in 1960s Indochina when a dangerous and clandestine meeting with insurgents --- and a brief but passionate encounter with Sieglinde, a young German woman --- alters the course of his life. He marries the captivating May, who is fleeing her own family disappointments. On the surface, they are a handsome, successful couple --- but the memory of Sieglinde persists in Harry’s thoughts, and May has her own secrets.

Tommy Ogden declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Auguste Rodin, and instead announces his intention to endow a boys’ school. His decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just’s novel.