Alice, Corvus and Annabel, each a motherless child, form an unlikely friendship. Alice is filled with convictions, Corvus with loss, and Annabel with a worldly pragmatism. Thrown together one summer, they make their way through an air-conditioned landscape electric with signs and portents and peopled by restless, disengaged adults. Annabel's father lusts after Donald, his handsome gardener, while enduring nightly visitations from his dead wife; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from bad to worse after he meets the girls; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn towards a darker solution; and an ageing big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with eight-year-old Emily Bliss Pickless. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead explores the vagaries of love, our thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all of us are led to our destiny.