"Zachary Brannagan is a brilliant young philosopher, all-but-dissertation at the University of Virginia, who can no longer find meaning in the world of intellectual abstraction.

In the manner of Nietzsche, he lays himself in the middle of the road to die because "he felt it as an obligation." The suicide attempt fails but catalyzes instead his remarkable journey outward - toward things, and amor fati, the love of making - a distinction insisted upon by the elderly, irreverent psychiatrist Michael Lazar, who befriends him in the psychiatric ward.".

"With nothing but Lazar's faith and a few of his dollars, Zach sets out on a cross-country journey ostensibly to unravel the mystery of his bloodlines, but the journey itself becomes an unfiltered taste of the world. By happenstance of violence, he finds himself at The Lake, an ad hoc orphanage in the dark heart of the Louisiana wilderness, where he meets Anna Beauchamp.

Breath-taking in her earthy competence, Anna lives in self-imposed exile with her "charges," eleven physically and mentally impaired children, among them the mysterious and mute Samuel, her most precious charge.".

"Zach is drawn into the world of The Lake, at first by necessity and then by desire, and the result is a pairing of powerful fears - his that experience does not exist outside the mind, and Anna's that all she loves will abandon her. They stir in each other an emotional awareness that neither has ever known, but in this haunting, sublime novel the price of love is tragedy."--BOOK JACKET.