Across the odd contours of the American landscape, people are searching for the things that aren't irretrievably lost, for the incandescent beneath the ordinary. An ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the frigid depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. A band of sixties radicals, now approaching middle age, reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. A fifty-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusive businessman husband at a highway rest stop, exploring the bittersweet pageant of the preceding years within the sanctuary of an Iowa cornfield. The Woman Lit by Fireflies is a sweeping tribute to the nation's heartland and the colorful, courageous people who inhabit it.