Benedict’s award-winning work spans fiction, nonfiction, and drama and focuses on issues related to women, soldiers, and the ways war affects lives far from the battlefields. Her seventh novel, and the second volume of a trilogy that began with Sand Queen, is set in a small town in upstate New York. It follows three women and their very different experiences of the Iraq War. Naema, an Iraqi medical student in Sand Queen, is now a doctor at a Veterans Affairs clinic. She struggles with both her own life-threatening injuries and the hostility of some of the Americans she treats, among them Rin, an angry veteran who lives on a remote farm with her blind daughter and several wolves, and Beth, wife of a soldier deployed in Afghanistan, who fears her long-absent husband will return irrevocably changed.