Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time." He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, "a rural nowhere...that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language." In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to "reinvent herself as the kind of person she'd been before" the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories--from the death of Bell's former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika's incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana's exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of home vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.