Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul --- the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery.

Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway, killing one of them. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life, but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind.

When her father, a Thomas Hardy scholar and former college president, dies suddenly, Flora Dempsey leaves her job as editor of a magazine for the “domestically obsessive and organically minded” to return to the small New England town of Darwin (“three hours from everywhere”) to act as his literary executor, or “High Literary Executioner,” as she grimly recasts it.