It's Just My Nature tells the romantic story of Martha, a sixty-six-year-old retired professor who is dying of cancer in Hospice care, and Joel, a jaded, questioning clergyman who is unceremoniously ushered in to provide pastoral care. Martha, he finds, possesses some unique knowledge in communicative diseases that the government desperately wants to get before she dies.

Interspersed with the first person accounts by both Joel and Martha is the narrative of a certain village in South Sudan that has been brutalized by an ALFA raid. One of the young women, Farris, designs...