Jeannette Walls, who grew up in poverty with a brilliant but alcoholic father, Rex, and an eccentric artist mother, Rose Mary, escapes to New York and becomes a successful writer.

Kevin, called “Freak,” a brilliant boy with a rare growth disorder, dies suddenly when his enlarged heart gives out.

Yeong-hye, who stopped eating meat after a disturbing dream, wastes away in a psychiatric hospital, believing she is becoming a tree.

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a serious novelist frustrated that publishers want stereotypical Black stories, writes a parody under the name Stagg R.

Todd Bowden, a bright California teenager who blackmailed a hidden Nazi war criminal, Kurt Dussander, into telling him about the death camps, is himself turned into a killer.

Julia Jarmond, an American journalist in Paris, discovers that her husband’s family’s apartment once belonged to the Starzynskis, a Jewish family arrested in the 1942 Vel’ d’Hiv roundup.

April Wheeler dies after trying to end her pregnancy at home.

Ada Smith, a ten-year-old with a clubfoot who was kept locked in a London flat by her cruel mother, is evacuated to Kent during World War II and finds love with her guardian, Susan Smith.

The novel ends with Billy Pilgrim being shot by Paul Lazzaro in 1976, as he predicted.

Shane, a mysterious gunfighter working on the Starrett family’s Wyoming homestead, straps on his gun one last time to stop the cattle baron Luke Fletcher and his hired gunman Stark Wilson.