A woman escapes death row in a fluke accident and returns to her husband in B.C. She is constantly haunted: both by her feeling of missing her baby, Angel, who she had lost after conceiving and birthing him on the drug-infused island of Tranquilandia; and also literally, by the ghosts of her former cell-mates, Rainy and Frenchy, and those of their children. She allows them all to follow her into bed at night, and accompany her throughout her waking life as well. She meets, among the living, the pregnant and drug-addicted Grace Moon; and Grace's brother, Hooker, who has a hook in place of one of his hands. She visits Grace and Hooker's village in the coastal wilderness, where walking on the beach brings her close to what she cannot give up.

Given is a love story, one of many kinds of love, and a narrative in which escaping jail is even more lonely than death row. It is a story of the constant kind of isolation that results from years of personal damage. Whatever this has been for the woman and her friends; whether from growing up in poverty, or the loss of a child; whether emptyhanded in prison, or free, with no identity and surrounded by people battling their own drug addictions and other demons; the result is that all characters seek their own desolate sort of contact with one another. Lying entangled on the floor, remembering a lost child, doing drugs together—all are clinging for intimacy within their personal challenges. No matter how intense her experience, this woman is empty without Angel's tiny fists and baby smell, but she keeps building on the love she has for him.

This is a sometimes humorous—always very human—emotional, literary crossing that never relents in its grip on us. It touches on North American Indigenous culture, personal relationships, jail life, and motherhood and companionship in some of the most abrasive possible circumstances. Given burns, as a penetrating and insightful witness to loss and personal connection, and as a challenge to the view that 'low' experience is below the high-brow.