Mark Smith, is a sensitive thirty-seven-year-old environmental scientist of mixed race. He tries to come to terms with his mother's painful death as he goes through the stages of grief. Mark is also reassessing his relationship with his gay twin sister, Maria, a lawyer. After several failed relationships with women in college, Mark, while at his mother's funeral in Chicago, reconnects with his high school girlfriend, Christy, an artist who paints self-portraits. He now believes he has finally found true and lasting love, but the country's civil unrest and political division plague the opportunity at a second chance. Author Clarence Major has devised a powerful novel about the cumulative unease and random violence that grip American life and ask what we should do about it. AUTHOR: Clarence Major is a novelist, poet and painter. His novels include Dirty Bird Blues (a Penguin Classic), Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection; My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and other novels. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. Major won a National Book Award Bronze Medal and many other awards. He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis.