The chosen place is the fictional and remote Bourne Island in the Caribbean and its timeless people are its inhabitants, mostly poor blacks whose ancestral legacy was slavery. There are two parts to the island—the modernized half, politically corrupt New Bristol, and the poor half, Bournehills.

The island becomes the special development project of the American-based Center for Applied Social Research, which hopes to bring the underdeveloped island into the twentieth century.

The modernizers are perceived as a mixed blessing and bring profound political, social, and economic change to the island, resulting in new hierarchies and tenuous, often conflicted relationships between islanders and mainlanders, blacks and whites, the premodern and modern, and, of course, between the wealthy and poor.

The conflicting forces are brought together in the main character Merle Kimbona, who symbolically represents Bournehills itself. She is well regarded by both those calling for modernization and those who fear for the destruction of their traditional way of life. Merle is the hope these two opposing camps might eventually come together in a positive way for Bournehills.

The novel is concerned with how blacks must confront the future by creating a new unity from their historically and psychologically fragmented sense of self in order to successfully transcend their history of social and economic oppression. In order to get there, the people on the island must come to terms with their fragmented diaspora identity before they will be prepared to build a better future for themselves.