It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife and two children. One day, Saul happens on an idea: stage a fake wedding for the benefit of her old world parents, invite a few friends in on the joke, and go about their lives.

The ruse works. Except Saul realizes he actually wants to marry Mona, who vows never to permanently tie herself to a man. After losing her city job in the 1970s fiscal crisis, Mona becomes a freelance news photographer for a radical new tabloid. When she beats the competition to capture a photo of a murderous vigilante taking the city by storm, she finds herself falling for a colleague—and Saul, now a rising star in government who is butting up against a young man named Donald Trump, fears he has lost her altogether. Years later, the affair not quite dead, Mona realizes she is pregnant with Saul's child.

Meanwhile, Saul's adult son, Tad, is traveling aimlessly across America, hunting for answers as the 1990s bleed into 9/11. Tad decides to take the darker path of the very vigilante Mona once exposed. And in the shadow of terrorism and war, Mona and Saul raise their son, Emmanuel, together—keeping their life a secret from Saul's wife and children. Spanning from the 1970s to the pandemic, this soaring, heartbreaking novel is a tour de force of ambition and grace, a great American chronicle that marks the emergence of a major new talent.