It's Christmas in New York in 1998, and Maria hopes to hear from her daughter, Pearl, who is studying in Ireland. But Pearl has been on a prolonged hunger strike and has now chained herself to a flagpole outside the American embassy. By the time Maria and her closest friend, Joseph, arrive in Dublin, Pearl is in the hospital, and the piquant narrator, who confesses an inability to influence the course of events, steps in to provide the background for this trio of complicated people of conscience, each forced by Pearl's desperate protest to confront the past. Maria remembers her privileged Catholic upbringing, her activist days, and Pearl's father, a Cambodian doctor who was most likely killed by the Khmer Rouge. Joseph, the housekeeper's son and heir to Maria's father's religious art business, faces his failure to live a life of his own design. Pearl, who never knew her father and whose involvement with IRA sympathizers led to her near-suicide, grapples with the question of how to live with the knowledge that we routinely do each other violent harm. As for Gordon, she outdoes herself. All of her books are exquisite and penetrating, but in this riveting novel, her compelling characters and their spiritual quandaries, her profound inquiries into beauty, compassion, and forgiveness, and the sheer radiance of her prose are surpassingly suspenseful, brilliant, and affecting.