Golden boy Nick Dunne, brings his wife, Amy, back to his hometown on the Mississippi River where she is miserable and on their fifth wedding anniversary she disappears, and soon Nick finds himself lying, being deceitful, and acting inappropriately but continues to claim his innocence with his twin sister at his side.

Over twenty years after the brutal murder of her mother and her own acquittal of the crime, Liza Barton's new husband, Alex Nolan, unexpectedly buys the New Jersey home where Liza's mother died and again becomes a suspect in another murder.

A story of a Chinese peasant and his passionate, dogged accumulation of land and more land, while weathering famine and drought and revolution.