This is the story of a green, two-row button accordion. Brought to America by its Sicilian maker in 1890, it survives a century and traverses a continent. The accordion's music resounds around the Cajun bayoux; notes drift out of a lonely Chicago tenement. A French-Canadian orphan struggles to master the battered instrument, left behind by his parents, searching for a lost past. Whether given, sold or stolen, the accordion passes through the hands of a host of unlucky owners who embody the hopes, hardships and passions of immigrant life in twentieth-century America. Utterly original, Proulx's novel stays in the mind like an old song and tugs at he memory like a half forgotten tune.