It won both the 2005 Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters[1] and the 2004 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award in Fiction.

John Dalton himself spent time in Douliu City, Taiwan teaching English and was eating in a restaurant with other teachers when a local businessman approached and told of his love for a woman on the Chinese mainland and offered $10,000 to anyone who would marry her and bring her back.

It took eight years to write and he was inspired by a number of writers, among them Charles Baxter, Alice Munro and specifically Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee and Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout.

[3] The story begins in Douliu, Taiwan where Christian volunteer and recent college graduate Vincent Saunders from Red Bud, Illinois, fluent in Mandarin, arrives to teach English and to share his faith.

Vincent refuses but later develops a relationship with one of his young students, which causes him to abandon his faith and to reconsider the offer.