Drawing on deep archival research, childhood memories, and conversations with relatives, friends, and fellow hostages, a noted historian, a passenger on an airliner hijacked by Palestinians in 1970, sets out to understand both what happened in the Jordan desert and her own fractured family and childhood pain.

Five teenagers from the elite Hartwell Academy are on their way back to New York from an end-of-summer camping trip in Idaho when they realize that something has gone wrong; one of them has become violently ill, and their private plane has apparently been hijacked and is headed in the wrong direction--and even if they can somehow break into the cockpit and manage to overpower the hijacker, they have no idea how to fly the plane, much less land it....

Fleeing war-torn China, a small planeload of people are hijacked to an idyllic valley in the Himalayas where time has virtually stopped. There Conway, a British diplomat, falls in love with a beautiful woman, and is asked to remain in Shangri-La as its new leader.

"It was June 1976 that an Air France plane carrying 244 passengers and a crew of 12 on a flight from Athens to Paris was hijacked by terrorists who forced the captain to alter course and eventually land at Uganda's Entebbe Airport. With the tacit approval of president Idi Amin, the passengers were held hostage and threatened with death if the Israeli government didn't comply with their captor's demand to release 53 Palestinian so-called freedom fighters...