A novel that portrays several characters in a village whose intertwined lives are transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency in Kenya. It features a reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret.

Son of a bankrupt landowner, Frank Gresham is intent on marrying his beloved Mary Thorne, despite her illegitimacy and apparent poverty. Frank's ambitious mother and haughty aunt are set against the match, however, and push him to save the family's mortgaged estate by making a good marriage to a wealthy heiress.

In eighteenth-century France there lived a man Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.

Tells the story of Adam Jeffson: the first man to reach the North Pole and the last man left alive on earth.