These stories reveal the lives of immigrant families haunted by lost loves. The characters, whose culture and families have been lost to the forces of history, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment. Lan Samantha Chang shows how history impinges upon family love, as she explores the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. A ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river. A mother commands a daughter to avenge her father's death.

The title novella is told by a woman whose love for an exiled musician compels her into a tragic marriage: her husband's unfulfilled desires nearly destroy their children. Again and again, Chang asks the question: Is ordinary love not a kind of burden, stifling and terrifying in the choices and responsibilities it forces on us? And yet we yearn for it, suffer for it, define ourselves by our experience of it, cannot live without it.