In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.

A story of life in France under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied village rife with resentment, resistance, and collaboration.

Strange things begin to happen when Mrs. Shimfissle, an eighty-year-old woman, falls out of a fig tree in her own front yard, in a novel about one woman's offbeat experiences in the hereafter.