Orson Caskill—patriarch, storekeeper, philosopher, and lover of life (particularly as it is lived in Osier County, Kentucky)— is dying. Gathered to celebrate a family wedding, five people whose lives he has touched as a husband, father, lover, and friend join Orson, reflecting not only on him but also on their own lives. In a postlude, Orson’s granddaughter works at fashioning a life enriched by her legacy.

Although these "Sunday people" range from Orson to an outlaw and rebel to a professor at a prestigious university in Chicago, they all share a lifelong allegiance to eastern Kentucky’s coal-mining towns, rural villages, and beautiful, endangered countryside.

This intense novel’s seven characters seek meaning as it can be discovered through landscape and history, with each exploring their reality in a chapter of his or her own.