A group of people leading widely disparate lives share links they don't even realize. Frank Frink has lost his job and is seeking to start a new career while pining for his estranged wife, and buckles under pressure from mounting racism. Mr. Tagomi finds himself struggling between the responsibilities placed on him by his position and his need to do what he feels is right. Baynes is a trade representative for a plastics company--who might really be a spy with important information to pass on. And Frank's wife Juliana finds herself embroiled in a mystery surrounding the titular Man in the High Castle, who has written The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel that seems to be influencing all of their lives. The premise of Grasshopper is simple: "what if Germany and Japan had lost World War 2?"

There is something really magical about The Man in the High Castle. It offers no easy answers, even to simple questions such as "what the heck is this about?" Clearly it is alternate history, but the alternate history mirrors our own in ways that are uncomfortable, with Japanese collectors snatching up authentic low-quality Americana out of an inversion of the kinds of fetishistic orientalism we've historically seen in our own world. We see Nazi Germany grow by displacing indigenous peoples and fighting communism with a fanatical focus on industry and aerospace--but isn't that what we did in the wake of the war, too? Meanwhile, the alternate-alternate history presented in Grasshopper is so optimistic, features such a benevolent America, that we're forced to acknowledge that our real history is closer to the Nazi victory than the dream of American greatness posited by Grasshopper.

And as readers, we know that these characters have found themselves in the worst timeline that history could have given them, so how do we reconcile their drive to make the best of their lives when they are so trapped by history? What emerges is a strange, messy, impossible-to-nail-down exploration of the role of free will and the importance of small decisions, even in a world whose greater movements are entirely out of the hands of any one individual to shape.