Michael McMaster believes his power-couple parents have grown complacent, forgetting the progressive impulses that once inspired them. His parents — foreign policy mandarin Alan and writer-politico Anna — believe their son is committing the folly of the young, spurning their wisdom on to how to change a fundamentally conservative society.

The Unmooring traces Michael’s journey as he rejects his family’s lifestyle, falls in love with a talented black actress, and becomes a politically engaged journalist. The journey takes Michael from the front lines of the civil rights struggle to the battlefields of Vietnam and the upheavals of 1968. It is a landscape like today’s, scarred by polarization, social conflict, official deceit and generational tensions. Michael’s journey challenges his capacity to grasp America’s deep racial fissures and tests the love he and his wife Riva feel for each other — especially when a tragedy forces Riva to re-examine the premises of her life.

As the era closes, both son and father face life-defining choices — and take sharply divergent paths.