Sixty-eight-year-old Hattie Kong, descendant of Confucius, daughter of an American missionary, has lost both her husband and her best friend in a single year: It was like having twinsShe got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium. But two years later, its time for Hattie to start over. She moves to a small New England town and is soon joined by a Cambodian American family and an ex-loverall of them looking to start anew. What Hattie makes of this situation and of the changing town of Riverlakechallenged as it is, in 2001, by fundamentalist Christians, struggling family farms, and unexpected immigrantslies at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, and what worlds we make of the world.