After a visit to the tropics, a woman returns to her husband and New England home. She struggles with the transition back to her regular life after she realizes that she felt happier and more at home in the tropics.

After her husband's unexpected death, a white widow becomes a recluse, spending all of her time in her unruly garden. One day, over come by rage, she feels compelled to harm the Black boy who works in her garden.

When a woman meets a strange seed salesman one day, she endeavors to create a magnificent—and unexpectedly magical—herb garden.

On a vacation in France with his wife and family, Reynolds reminisces about the trip he and his wife took to Mont-Saint Michel decades ago, despairing at the bigger and faster pace of the town and the beauty and culture that seems to have been lost since then.

A grandfather renews the family tradition of blueberry-picking on Ragged Mountain with his grandson, showing him secret landmarks of family legacy on the way.

On the beaches of a remote British Caribbean Island, a mixed-race family enjoys a relaxing vacation. However, a simple conversation with a local white woman about the island soon evolves into one of introspection and racial discrimination.

In the far future, a Welsh woman temporarily moves to a space colony on a distant planet with her husband, Owen. The woman regals her space-born daughter with tales of the wonders of Earth, and her daughter develops a great longing for Earth that eventually puts her life at risk.

A graduate student, on a trip in the Sonoran Desert, contemplates quitting her PhD program and moving on with life.

In a universe where the poor remain on earth and the rich live in space, a poverty-stricken Black teenager with a life-threatening illness dreams of visiting the upper world and is offered a chance to do so through a high school science contest.

Nana, a twenty-nine year old Ghanaian-American man from Cleveland, tries to repair his relationships with Sassy, his high school sweetheart, and Edwin, his Princeton-educated older brother, when Edwin comes home for the first time in five years.