The Second Coming is set primarily around 2011, but with leaps in time that take it 2022, 2001 and occasionally elsewhere.  It focuses on two primary characters - Jolie Aspern, a precocious and troubled 13-year-old living in New York with her mother Sarah, and her estranged father Ethan, an ex-convict and recovering addict.  It begins compellingly, with Jolie finding herself hospitalised following a narrow escape on Subway tracks, and Ethan receiving a call from Sarah that convinces him that he has something to offer her, and returns to New York to seek her out.

Martyr! introduces us to Cyrus Shams, a recently sober son of Iranian immigrants (and evidently an autobiographical proxy for the author). As a child he moved to the US following the loss of his mother when her plane (Iran Air Flight 655; based on a real incident) was shot down over the Persian Gulf by US forces. His father, who made his way in the States as a factory farm worker, has also died, leaving Cyrus seeking meaning initially in narcotics but subsequently in poetry.