In the seventy-sixth year of his life Chester Garland, the distinguished psychiatrist, author, and campaigner for human rights, is struck by a subway train and dies.

Soon after Chester Garland's death, his son, Paul, receives a call from his father's lawyer. His inheritance, it turns out, will be a thoroughly unexpected one. It is his father's wish that Paul possess three diaries written decades earlier, in the year when Chester, on a trip to France, unaccountably walked out on his family and profession.

As cool, detached Paul, a cyberspace cartoonist, reads the diaries and returns to his father's bestselling book, Abraham, Isaac, Esau, he finally faces the event that has shadowed his life since childhood. He embarks, as his father had a quarter-century earlier, on a pilgrimage of love and grief, of passions - religious, erotic, and intellectual - and of discovery that is as startling as it is moving.