A fortyish cancer-stricken, emaciated Frank Crosby and his fifteen-year-old son Clay, who is the healthful, youthful image of his father, are spending an afternoon enjoying the atmosphere of Venice Beach. They enter Oddities, a store where the gypsy woman owner gives them a pair of special wingtip shoes. Later that night in the hospital where Frank lay dying, he shares with Clay his memory of a postcard image: a golf course where people are playing and are leisurely sipping tea. Frank dies and leaves behind a distraught family: Clay, his little sister Maggie, and their mother Janice. Clay wistfully goes to his father's closet and finds the wingtips from earlier in the day. Putting them on, he is transported back in time and becomes his father as a child. He discovers he can travel back and forth in time just by putting on or taking off the shoes. Clay learns a great deal about his father's early years and is eager to learn more.

Recently orphaned David must move to the Isle of Man to live with his grandfather, Adam, who's a sheep farmer. Both long for the end of the summer, having nothing in common but their love for dogs, notably Adam's precious champion sheepdog Bob. David strikes a friendship with Maggie, the sassy daughter of friendly neighbor Keith Moore, but Adam hates that family on account of an old canine competition-related tragedy. Other neighbors suspect Bob and the Moore's dog of the recent series of nocturnal sheep-kills.

It is Christmas Time in New Bedford and trouble is affecting the Bailey family.

Two neighboring families in Florida, one black and one white, struggle with the problems of race, poverty, prejudice, and absent fathers, as their children become friends over the course of one summer and fall.

A cop is after a nasty serial killer. Cop's wife and kids are somewhere in the city too. Then a disastrous earthquake hits the city.