The son of Indian immigrants born in America wants to fit in with fellow New Yorkers, but his family is unwilling to let go of their traditional ways.

Circus saxophonist Vladimir Ivanoff suddenly defects from his touring troupe in that temple of "Western decadence," Bloomingdale's. He wins asylum and moves into the crowded Harlem flat of Black security guard Lionel Witherspoon. Although Vladimir learns that life in America can be cold and even painful, he grows to love what seems to him a strange and wondrous land.

In 1846, waves of Irish immigrants poured into the New York neighborhood of Five Points. "Billy the Butcher" bands his fellow "Native Americans" into a gang to take on the Irish gang "The Dead Rabbits, " organized by Priest Vallon. After a bloody clash Vallon is dead and his son ends up in a brutal reform school. In 1862, that boy returns to seek vengeance against the man that killed his father.

Every night while the city sleeps, Ahmad, a former rock star in his native Pakistan, drags his heavy cart along the streets of New York. Every morning, he sells coffee and donuts to a city he cannot call his own. One day the pattern of this harsh existence is broken by a glimmer of hope for a better life.

In pre-WWI Brooklyn, young Francie struggles to keep her idealism alive in the face of grinding poverty, her father's alcoholism, and the comedies and tragedies of ordinary life.

Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil war in Angola, a New York taxi driver is reunited with his now devoutly religious wife and teenage daughter when they are finally able to follow him to America. But after living thousands of miles apart for so long, the three find they must discover one another's strengths, forgive one another's weaknesses, and bridge cultural and generational divides to build a life together. Told in three...