Jude Fawley moves to Christminster where he works as a stonemason after his wife abandons him where he falls in love with his cousin. Poverty soon threatens when they are shunned by society for deciding to live together.

"Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children or a mortgage, as their Midwestern values (and parents) seem to require. Now on the cusp of forty, they are both working at jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful, Joe is floundering--both in limbo, caught somewhere between...

Jimmy, AWOL from the Army, heads across America from Albany to New Orleans, Ohio, and Texas in a souped-up Chevy with his pregnant girlfriend, Christy, transforming themselves from passionate lovers into a young family along the way.