Arthur Fournier, a physician, recounts his time in Haiti and above all the period after the earthquake, which the book describes as the largest natural disaster the world has known. He works alongside Haitians dealing with what the quake left behind, and draws from that experience lessons about living and dying, about courage and about endurance.

Much of the book concerns his patients with AIDS and the particular kind of care their illness required. A private family tragedy, disclosed later, returns the narrative to where it began.

The publisher places the result in the company of Camus's The Plague as an account of the human condition.