Will McCay has just finished college in North Carolina, ready to leave the Raleigh campus behind and the past four years self-destruction that came with it. Three months later he is homeless and has returned to graduate school in the same department. Worried that he is bound to make the same mistakes over and over, Will hopes to find redemption by helping out at the local homeless shelter. Keeping the company of a waiting pit bull, a nihilistic roommate, the shelter manager from a troubled family, and a vagrant more concerned with helping others than himself, Will realizes he isn't the only one trying to outrun the past. In Maxwell's debut novel, this meditative story follows Will McCay as he tries to reconcile and piece together the themes of family, home, and whether people really ever change.