What would you ask someone who has lived nearly two thousand years-and is from another world?
When Theodore Hicks discovers a mysterious spacecraft that has crashed in his Indiana cornfield, he does something unexpected: he protects the being who emerges from it.
His name is Tu.
What begins as an impossible encounter becomes a secret passed through generations of the Hicks family-and a series of conversations unlike any they could have imagined.
An inquisitive farmer wants to understand the universe. An eight-year-old girl asks the questions only a child would think to ask. Years later, devastated by tragedy, she questions whether there is a God at all. A dying woman searches for answers about death and what might come after. A houseman wonders about the purpose of life. And a teenage boy searching for answers about who he is discovers that an unlikely confidant may understand him better than anyone-including himself.
Across decades, they ask Tu about life, love, family, sexuality, God, karma, consciousness, death, the stars-and what it means to be human.
But sometimes the most extraordinary answers begin with the simplest question.