When Bo Moon takes his seven-year-old son to a ski resort in Utah, he sees smoke rising in the mountains. This one magical moment takes the psychiatrist back to a painful part of his life, when all he could focus on was survival.

"Smoke rises in the distant mountain" was one of the first phrases he was taught in Korean. Bo's parents, Suk and Yunhee, had been desperate to remove any trace of their Japanese background, as the Korean peninsula was torn apart by infighting and eventually war.

Bo looks back on his childhood, first in the Manchurian frontier and eventually in the South Korean city of Seoul. He has a strained relationship with his father, Suk, who gave up a career in education to join the often-corrupt police force. Yunhee, on the other hand, sacrifices everything for her son when the North Korean invasion pushes them into a refugee camp.

Meanwhile, in Pyongyang, a young woman faces the horrors of North Korean labor camps, and a sadistic officer plots his revenge against his father Suk Moon The stories of these disparate people will entangle and collide in this vivid portrait of a nation torn apart.

This is a contemporary historical novel spanning from the 1920s Korea, Japan, and Manchuria through World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War to present America. The novel is a personal tale of the coming of age of a boy in South Korea, of an idealistic young woman in North Korea imprisoned in one of its harsh prison camps, and of love with all its rewards, sufferings, sacrifices, distortions, hate, and revenge.