Claire goes missing the night her father agrees to give her up for adoption. Her mother died when she was born. In the tiny fishing town of Ville Rose, Haiti, she and her father are not the only ones to have experienced loss. As the poor townspeople search by moonlight for the seven-year-old girl, each remembers what death has stolen from their own lives: a forbidden love cut down by slum gangsters; a mother whose rare affluence could not save her child.

In prose that shimmers with folkloric imagery, Danticat intertwines their stories to reveal a deep connection between locals of distinct classes and creeds. Her vision of modern Haiti makes the unknowable familiar; like the townspeople, the reader shares a common humanity - always caught between the darkness and the light.