Janet "Shady" Shahadi's life doesn't start out well. When Shady, the daughter of an Arab father and Irish mother, is fourteen months old, her mother decides to give her away, bundles her up, and has a cab driver deliver Shady to her father's cigar store. Shady grows up in alternately nurturing and abusive environments, and when she is older, Shady is told her mother is dead.

After a disastrous marriage and numerous affairs and fly-by-night relationships, Shady falls in love with Bobby Summerville, a black law student and sixties-generation civil rights activist. Bobby deepens Shady's...