Althea is a global nomad, an American born in an African village, the daughter of a relief worker. She is fourteen when she digs in her heels and refuses to leave her true community and return to her mother’s idea of civilization: the United States. But when Althea finds herself caught up in the horrific crossfire of an African civil war, evacuation is inevitable.

When Elizabeth, a teacher and mother of four, leaves her New Jersey home early on a bitterly cold day, she imagines she can escape the tragedy that has overtaken her life. She doesn’t know that nineteen-year-old Cynthia, only thirty minutes away, will soon slam the door on a mother she can’t abide, or that Alexander, embittered and alone, will steal a computer in Connecticut and take a bus south. Like migratory birds, their journey toward warmer climes brings them to the Florida backwoods, where a collection of unlikely locals help them keep the forces of life at bay.

When Bea moves to South Carolina in 1980 with her recently remarried mother and her eccentric sister Izzy, she carries with her a box of archival treasures: the souvenirs of a life she barely recalls, memories of her father and the opera Madame Butterfly. Soon Bea’s innocent friendships embroil her in a web of racial tension that she escapes by entering even darker territory.