2005 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction
A Los Angeles Times Book Review Favorite Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Novel of the Year

It is 1974 and a tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), abducts a newspaper heiress, who then takes the guerrilla name"Tania" and shocks the world by choosing to remain with her former captors. Soon most of the SLA are dead, killed in a suicidal confrontation with police in Los Angeles, forcing Tania and her two remaining comrades--the pompous and abusive...

Writer Sandy Mulligan is in trouble. To escape his turbulent private life and the scandal that's maimed his public reputation, he's retreated from Brooklyn to a quiet Michigan town to finish his long-overdue novel. There, he becomes fascinated by John Salteau, a native Ojibway storyteller who regularly appears at the local library.

But Salteau is not what he appears to be--a fact...