A house built to last forever (nothing does)—next door to a haunted house on the market. No-escape rooms. Not one but two art shows. A Texas cathouse replete with a one-legged dancing lady. A missing girl. Missing minds. A motel worker. Mexican restaurant karaoke birthday party. A houseplant as metaphor. Multiple personalities. Annihilation.

A group of strangers take a luxurious trip abroad and face the decision of whether to remain. A novice journalist meets a preeminent novelist on the eve of his latest work. The recipient of a letter offering a better life reluctantly responds to its call to action.

In the late 1980s, stuck in the front seat of his mother's old Chevy, Travis Wains is forced to grow up too fast. Under the thumb of an abusive father and subsequent years split between youth detention and a farm in North Carolina, Travis longs for home and a past from which he can escape. How did he get here? Was there something he could've done differently? And what really happened that led him here? It's only when these diverging roads he's travelled ultimately wind up together that the final culminating event from his uncertain past reveals his present with clarity.

A meet-cute made on earth between Kit and Dave: Kit in New Jersey, though mostly online, busy with the eBay storefront from which she sells religious relics of questionable origin; Dave, in Oregon with his ailing grandmother whose faith is fervent under his patient care. Over the course of twelve days, as their hellish worlds figuratively and literally begin to burn around them, the plot thickens when Agatha receives one of Kit’s sacred relics. On opposite timezones and coasts, fate or something like it brings them into one another’s immediate orbit and to confronting their own individual realities. What will tomorrow bring? And will they actually meet? IRL?

It is 1993 in New York City, and the Whitney family wakes up in their SoHo apartment. Marigold is preoccupied with installing a new show inside her eponymous gallery, Hammond walks to work in the financial district as usual, and the children, Anson and Ellie, attend school. When an uninvited house guest enters their orbit, the family reunites and a retrospective of their individual lives begins. So too does the last decade of the twentieth century.

Book Two of The Generation of Leaves


It is 1955 in New York City, and Velva Whitney tours the Museum of Modern Art with her son, Foster, in his stroller. While she struggles to become an actress of stage and screen, Herb Whitney is afflicted by more than just his middling career as a journalist for The New York Times. In their shabby West Village apartment, the dysfunction within their family is rooted in their past, one which will never go away—playing against a turbulent future that leads them through the better part of the next half-century in a rapidly adapting America. The 1960s bring about change, before the ’70s usher in better times. Then, when Foster Whitney is all grown up, it’s Black Monday.

It is 1938 in Oklahoma, Black Sunday, and the dust has arrived. A teenaged boy takes it as it comes, not only the end of the world as he knows it, but what’s ahead, and which he can’t see. Then it follows Samuel Howell, a man with a camera, in post-war California, from black-and-white to Technicolor, when he meets journalist Herb Whitney on his first assignment: photographing a war widow. A historical earthquake leads him to the San Joaquin Valley, where he’ll spend the summer of 1952 falling in love all over again. The earth moves and aftershocks abound, but there is no going back now. Only forward.