When a fourteen-year-old boy moves with his family to a farm town, he reads a book that leads him to have a crisis of faith and he begins to question what really happens after death.

A man's lonely life focused on the pursuit of reason and music leaves him questioning what more there may be in the lives of other people and of religion.

A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.

After his death, a Judge converses with an old friend and a philosopher about the reality of an afterlife and grapples with the idea of regaining people he’s missed his entire life.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

A wife leaves her husband in order to ensure his ultimate salvation after they are rejected from the Christian church for their polygamist marriage.

An old woman experiences several blackouts as she approaches death.

The tragic loss of his childhood friend puts a boy on the path of religion - but his inner feelings remain as repressed and turbulent as they always were.

After two of a man's acquaintances die by suicide, he goes on a hunting trip and can't stop thinking about why they wanted to die.

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.