San Francisco is the setting for Gina Berriaults fourth novel tracing the life of Ilona Lewis, a fiction writer who is abandoned by her lover, Martin Vandersen, at the moment he gains great fame as a novelist. Hoping to heal from this abandonment, she is stirred by the need to remember a man she left behind years ago: her older brother Albert, a difficult and troubled soul. Ilona realizes that her shame over him, which has lingered for years, has blighted her compassion and damaged her sense of wholeness. But while she struggles with these fateful memories, she experiences in her life what she had previously experienced only in her writing--the mingling of souls--and she begins to understand who the lights of earth really are.