It tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the Syrian-American owner of a painting and contracting company in New Orleans, Louisiana, who chose to ride out Hurricane Katrina in his Uptown home.

After the hurricane, he traveled the flooded city in a secondhand canoe rescuing neighbors, caring for abandoned pets and distributing fresh water, but was arrested without reason or explanation at one of his rental houses, along with three others, by a mixed group of U.S. Army National Guard soldiers and local police officers.

Zeitoun and the others were accused of terrorist activities, presumably because of the large amount of money found in their possession as well as maps of the city and a storage disc, and were detained for 23 days.

Zeitoun began to explore the city in a secondhand canoe, distributing what supplies he had, ferrying neighbors to higher ground and caring for abandoned dogs.

He worked closely with the Zeitoun family while researching and writing the book, meeting with them multiple times in New Orleans and letting them read six or seven versions of the manuscript.

[2] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying of Eggers that, "He kicked off the decade as the look-at-me stylist behind 2000's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

[11] In September 2018, after completing his prison sentence, Zeitoun was ordered deported by an immigration judge, but then freed from federal detention, as his native Syria was in the midst of a civil war and had no diplomatic relations in place to facilitate receiving deportees.