With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man - also named Jonathan Safran Foer - sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape...

Feeling betrayed after her greedy cousin moves in, eighteen-year-old Arcie Bryant, whose parents died suddenly when she was eleven, leaves her wealthy grandfather's home expecting to never see him again, but years later they cross paths, and Christianity makes an unexpected arrival in her life.

Piper, the adopted teenage daughter of Kathryn and Tom Scanlon, refuses to believe that her mother's gruesome death was a freak accident-especially once another sordid story featuring a shared suspect comes to light.

One day in 1905, eleven-year-old Lucius is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck to "borrow" his grandfather's automobile. Ned McCaslin, a Negro, stows away in the car and the three embark on an odyssey which ends at Miss Reba's bordello.