Days after 9/11, an avowed "American terrorist" named Mark Stroman, seeking revenge, walks into the Dallas minimart where Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a former Bangladesh Air Force officer, has found temporary work and shoots him, nearly killing him. Giridharadas traces the making of these two men, Stroman and Bhuiyan, and of their fateful encounter, following them as they rebuild shattered lives. Ten years after the shooting, an Islamic pilgrimage seeds in Bhuiyan a strange idea: if he is ever to be whole, he must reenter Stroman's life. He publicly forgives Stroman, and wages a legal and public-relations campaign to have his attacker spared from the death penalty.