Here comes a walking fire, the Fool says to Lear as he sees Gloucester walking across a heath carrying a torch. This novel opens in fall, 1988, as Cora, an anti-war activist, returns to the U.S. from Canada where she has lived for twenty years. A college student in the mid-sixties, Cora becomes politically curious, then joins the anti-war movement. Based on King Lear and written from the point of view of Cordelia, the book weighs definitions of patriotism and loyalty. In her return as in her past, Cora is testing borders between suffering and virtue, idealism and commitment, self and family, and exploring possibilities of change.