Mac Peters has spent the last six years in Cambodia, trying to revive heath care in a country that simmers with insurgency. But today, he is on his way home to the United States for Christmas. En route, he wrestles with lingering feelings for his college sweetheart and a new enchantment with a Cambodian woman, with his duties to his aging parents and his work for the desperately poor in his adoptive country. Struggling to decide if he should return to Cambodia, he mentally revisits the influential places of his life: sagacious Buddhist temples, quaint New England town squares, sexy New York bedrooms, Mekong cabins pelted with monsoons... He knows, perhaps too well, that both tragedy and bliss can strike anywhere. But can he regain a sense of "home"?