Summary

The novel opens in Montreal, Canada, in 2006. Janie, a Cambodian immigrant, is married to a man named Navin, an engineer. They have a son named Kiri who is in the second grade. Janie’s friend and colleague, Hiroji, left town three months prior and has not been seen since then. Janie has recently been sleeping in Hiroji’s empty apartment for the past few days instead of in her apartment with her son Kiri and her husband Navin. Hiroji is a neurologist, and Janie thinks about a patient of his named Elie. She was a retired biomedical engineer who spent much of her free time painting. At the age of 58, she began to lose the ability to articulate herself verbally. Hiroji and Janie studied Elie’s brain and found specific aspects of neurological degeneration. Hiroji and Janie co-authored a scientific paper on Elie’s...