In the summer of 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on one of the Kindertransports and placed with foster parents in Wales. For reasons of their own, the childless Calvinist couple erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity.

Bradley Pearson, narrator and hero, is an elderly writer with a 'block'. Finding himself surrounded by predatory friends and relations - his ex-wife, her delinquent brother, a younger, deplorably successful writer, Arnold Baffin, Baffin's restless wife and engaging daughter - Bradley attempts to escape.

Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad kinfeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. He is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire clan whose members have a finger in every establishment pie.

Offers a fictional account of the spiritual odyssey of an American woman in Australia. Summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aboriginals to accompany them on a walkabout through the outback, she learns how they live and thrive in natural harmony with the plants and animals that exist in the rugged geography of the desert region.

On a property in New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. As years pass and Ellen grows into a beautiful young woman, her father announces his decision: she will marry the first man who can name all the species of the eucalypt, down to the last tree.