Lowell Edgecomb returns home to Maine after a successful career in Chicago and an unsuccessful relationship. At a friendly softball game he meets Fiona Sparrow, the daughter of a single mother and a black father. He is drawn to her shy sweetness, perhaps because like her he too is a child of a single mother and has long felt an empty space inside because of it. But their relationship meets resistance from a local racist Nazis group at the same time Lowell's half-brother, Bill Paine, becomes ensnared by another softball player, this one a predatory female, Marilyn Prence, who causes Bill to betray his wife and little child. These two chance meetings at a friendly softball game lead in twisted paths involving many other characters to both tragedy and redemption while the novel explores the many external ways—race, class, religion, sexual orientation, even appearance and personality—people judge each other.