Welcome to the world of hospice where no one talks about the weather or other trivialities. Enter Matt, a fledgling screenwriter who volunteers to work with the terminally ill in exchange for a good plot for his next script. He meets the people who work, die, and mourn in this world of last moments. In the novel-in-stories style of Tim O'Brien's "July July", O'Connell's characters in "Evacuation Plan" reveal themselves in poignantly unfolding stories: the gambler who played a risky game involving his wife and his ex-con father; the mortician who was an unwed father-to-be; the daughter whose dying father had no clue about the night her world spun out of control; the nurse who lived among ageing neighbours and struggled to hold her own family in place; the drunk who magically encountered himself as a boy. Forgiveness, joy, making the final leap: "Evacuation Plan" is the story of a world in which the clock ticks off the final moments for all of us and makes of those moments a lifetime.