The novel is set in the future, on the fictional Caribbean island of Ganae (based loosely on Haiti).

[1] The story is told by Father Paul Michel, a Canadian missionary to Ganae, as a letter to himself about the life he has led.

[1] Father Paul supports a young priest, Jeannot, in his rebellion against Ganae's despotic ruler Uncle D. Reviewing the novel for The Independent, its critic Tom Adair said: "No Other Life dovetails questions of allegiance, tests of faith and the clash of cultures into a fiction of ideas tied at its heart to real lives lived.

"[3] Writing in The Independent in 2009, Stephen Smith, in a re-evaluation of the novel, explains that Moore, influenced by Graham Greene, "took a lead from the story of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his real-life progress from rags to spiritual riches" and shows how the life of Moore's protagonist predicts the eventual political fate of Haiti's leader.

"Moore's literary prescience, comparable to Greene's prefiguring the Cuban missile crisis in Our Man in Havana, has to the best of my knowledge never been remarked on".