The novel begins with a small group of armed militants, a much older Clare Savage among them, traveling through Jamaica's remote Cockpit Country.
The militants have settled on land once owned by Clare's grandmother Miss Mattie, where they train together and grow food as well as produce illegal drugs.
Kitty Savage, Clare's mother, is not happy about moving away from all she has ever known, but she resigns herself to quiet depression upon departure from Jamaica and arrival in Miami.
Fed up with the constant racism she encounters, Kitty decides to slip messages into the linens before they are delivered—messages such as “Marcus Garvey was right” and “America is cruel.
Upon arriving in London Clare finds a room to rent and spends some time visiting various museums, browsing bookshops and generally getting to know England.
After some time at the university Clare decides to take her uncle up on his invitation to come back to Jamaica, where she attends the same party as Paul H. before he was killed by Christopher, and meets Harry/Harriet.
Upon her return, Clare witnesses a National Front march and is deeply disturbed by the aggression and racism on display on her college campus.
While traveling she receives a letter from Harry/Harriet telling her that her aunt and uncle in Kingston are moving to Miami and leaving her grandmother's old place in the country to her alone.
Clare continues to travel around Europe with Bobby, who is still struggling mentally and physically with the after-effects of the war, until one day he disappears without warning.
On the night of a terrible fire where many old women are burned alive, alluded to earlier in a letter from Harry/Harriet to Clare, Christopher shows up at the scene shouting prophecies at the top of his lungs.
She is interrogated about her motives and convinces the militants that she is genuine in her desire to make a violent revolution on behalf of the poor and oppressed in Jamaica.
In the final chapter of the book, a film crew has come to Jamaica to make a movie about the Maroons, and they have hired Christopher, “de Watchman”, to play a small role.
Christopher's loyalty to and hatred for his employers is another example; he is caught between the need to occupy a subservient identity to keep his job and the need to take care of his grandmother, to play the role of grandson.
Whereas in Abeng, Clare tries to figure out a way of knowing and understanding history that is not exclusive or oppressive, in No Telephone to Heaven she is trying to figure out a way to act on her knowledge of history—particularly the sequences of Jamaica's colonial history, in which slavery, colonization, and subsequently a Third World, underdeveloped status determine the position of Jamaica today, as Belinda Edmondson notes (185-186).
The problem of historical action is perhaps articulated most powerfully in the terrorists' doomed attack on the civilian film crew who are making a movie about the Maroons (featuring Cudjoe and Nanny Granny, two important figures from Jamaican history and Afro-Creole folklore).
Just as goods and people moved from the Caribbean to the US and then on to England during slavery's heyday, Clare travels between the three countries in an effort to discover more about herself and her family.
All the concerns of the novel can be read as linked to colonialism and post-colonialism, for both colonization and decolonization have had far-reaching impacts on every aspect of Jamaican history.
The novel assesses the relationship between colonial and post-colonial Jamaica by exploring the various ways in which colonization and decolonization have shaped what it means to be Jamaican.