The story is interspersed with fictionalized accounts of Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk across the Twin Towers, the date on which the two main events of the novel occur: a fatal car crash and a trial.

In 1974, an Irishman named Ciaran travels to New York City to see his younger brother, Corrigan, a devout Jesuit monk who has moved to the projects of the Bronx.

This comes into direct conflict with the vows of chastity he took as a teenager and his sworn devotion to God, and he struggles to reconcile these beliefs with his love for Adelita.

Several months after Ciaran initially arrives in New York City, there is an incident in which many of the prostitutes are arrested, and Tillie and Jazzlyn are held in jail over an outstanding warrant for robbery.

Ciaran agrees, and discusses his brother with Adelita, eventually coming to the conclusion that they have the right to be happy together for the time being no matter how their relationship will end.

Lara, the passenger in the gold car, pleads with her husband Blaine, who was driving, to stop and accept responsibility, but loses her nerve when she hears sirens approaching and the two leave the scene of the crash.

The same day, Claire, a woman from a very wealthy southern family who lives on the Upper East Side, hosts a gathering for a group of mothers who have lost children in the Vietnam war.

Claire is greatly upset by this but cannot figure out why, eventually realizing that she resents the idea that someone would be so flippant about their own personal safety, showing so little disregard for their life when their sons were forced to give up their own without a choice.

After several hours of talking, Claire's husband, Solomon, a judge, returns home, and tells them that he had presided over the case of the man on the tightrope and charged him a dollar and ten cents - one penny per floor - as well as another performance.

After a fight with Blaine, who insists that they were not responsible, she returns to the city and checks the hospitals to find out what happened to Corrigan, eventually learning that he died.

Ciaran accepts, but immediately recognizes her car as the one involved in the crash, and angrily asks her why she didn't stop when Lara lies and tells him she was driving.

While she is in prison, she is visited several times by Lara, who brings her books of Rumi's poetry (at Ciaran's suggestion) and assures her that her granddaughters are doing fine.

Despite the fact that many of the protagonists have never met and are from completely different worlds, they are all affected by the same occurrences; in subsequent interviews, the author has noted his intention to point out the melodramatic tensions present in all of our lives, whether perched upon a death-defying high wire, or merely trying to live out a more "ordinary" life, "where there is still an invisible tight-rope wire that we all walk, with equally high stakes, only it is hidden to most, and only 1 inch off the ground".

[8][9][10][11] The judging panel, among whom were John Boyne and Michael Hofmann,[12] described the book as a "remarkable literary work [...] a genuinely 21st century novel that speaks to its time but is not enslaved by it", noting the book's opening pages in which "the people of New York city stand breathless and overwhelmed as a great artist dazzles them in a realm that seemed impossible until that moment; Colum McCann does the same thing in this novel, leaving the reader just as stunned as the New Yorkers, just as moved and just as grateful".