Gabriel Geismer - budding astronomer and the son of a rabbi - is on his way from youth to manhood during the 1970s when he falls in love with the famous and beguiling Hundert family, different from and imagined worthier than his own. Over the course of a decade-long drama, Gabriel enters more and more passionately into the lives of his chosen tribe, discovering at the inmost centre that it is he alone that must bear the full weight of their tragedies...