The beautiful but ultimately disillusioned stories in this book share a theme with variations on the nature of home, displacement and exile. It is billed as a novel only because characters whom we meet as protagonists in one chapter visit two or three others either in secondary or peripheral roles. In structure, the book is a broken chain of relationships.

In "Envy," the first of six stories, engineers Toby and Ernst are sent to Vietnam at the height of the war to figure out why the guidance systems that their company built are sending planes off course. In the last, "The Other Side of the World," a middle-aged former tin prospector returns from Thailand and takes a job at Universal Screw and Fastener, selling nuts and bolts to the military. He becomes an ace salesman until the day he learns that many of the screws sold for use in fighter planes in Vietnam are cheap and often fail: That is the discovery Toby and Ernst make in the opening chapter.

Toby envies Ernst's self-sufficiency. He is laconic, unfathomable, untouchable in a way that Toby finds admirable, possessing an inner fortitude that Toby lacks. On R&R in Thailand, he meets Toon, a nurse, marries her and lives with her, her relatives and eventually their two children in a togetherness that feels like a chokehold. He is astonished and envious again when his unreadable son becomes a Buddhist monk. He tries to see into "that glassy space of the other life -- with its freedoms and its sufficiencies, the unled life -- perhaps not better than this life, either, but always longed for."

He shares with all the characters a restless longing for a life and a home elsewhere, only to discover it is an ever-receding mirage. In the third and longest story, "Paradise," set in the pre-crash 1920s, a young woman named Corinna loses her parents and house in a Miami hurricane. Literally homeless, she sails for Siam (later to become Thailand) to join her brother Owen, the aforementioned tin prospector. Soon she falls in love with the country and vows to never leave.

Owen returns to the States after a near-deadly bout of malaria. Corinna stays and marries a British teacher at the missionary school where she works, but the reverberations of the Sino-Japanese war are heard even in the sleepy town of Pattani. Students fade away, and the school closes. The couple, with their two children, settle in Florida, a place she finds hideously changed.

She feels like an exile. Her memories of her childhood homes feel "incomplete and only half true. ...The [Thai] jungle was also incomplete to me, for all its teeming density as I drew near it. I began to think of each spot on the globe as a mere part, the section any lesson had to be broken down to" but cannot be understood as a whole.

In "Independence," Kit, Toby's high school girlfriend is now a divorced single mother, who heads off on a road trip to Mexico. She happily settles there and feels at home until a frightening encounter forces her to acknowledge that independence is not a triumphant state but an emptying out and learning how to live in emotional starvation. In "Allegiance" Mike, a historian of Sicily who has never left home, meets up again with his high school sweetheart, Viana, whose Italian-immigrant parents disowned her when she married a Thai doctor (the grandson of a character in a previous story) and moved to Thailand. After her husband's death they take her back, and in due time she rekindles her romance with Mike and marries him. But she remains in e-mail contact with Thai friends, which, after 9/11, does not sit well with government snoops. Mike learns that the familiar can turn menacing in an instant and that "home" can become a term of bitter irony as the place where you are not safe at all.

The book demonstrates that globalization does not, for better and worse, necessarily reach into individual lives. Mike tells us, "From my desk it was clear that each separate corner of the world was obsessed with its own set of the familiar, the mass of fine points its residents were sure every human had to know. The whole ... globe was populated by idiot savants, who knew what they knew very well and not all that much else." Other worlds are improbable truths.

Brigitte Frase of Minneapolis also reviews for Speakeasy, the New York Times and Salon.com.