For years, Conor Lyons has searched in vain for his mother. Now, at the age of twenty-three, he returns to his native Ireland, to find his dying father fishing obsessively in the polluted waters of a local stream.

Driven to continue his search by tantalizingly incomplete family stories, Conor begins to plumb the mystery of his parents' lives.

With unreliable memories and scraps of photographs as his only clues, he follows in the tracks of his father - a rootless photographer - as he moved from war-torn Spain, where he accompanied the Fascists, to the barren plains of Mexico, where he met and married Conor's mother, to the American West, and finally back to Ireland, where the marriage and the story reach their heartrending climax.

As the narratives of Conor's quest and his parents' tragedy twine and untwine, Colum McCann creates a mesmerizing evocation of the gulf between memory and imagination, love and loss, past and present.