Zara is a star-shooter—a member of an elite class of space workers who travel throughout the galaxy delivering supplies to space stations and newly settled planets. A minor accident causes Zara’s ship to be delayed on an unexplored world. The crew is enchanted by the planet’s lush beauty, but when the star-shooters' idyllic interlude is suddenly interrupted by a distress call, they discover their paradise has a dangerous secret. After a near-death experience, Zara wakes up in a hostile place and discovers her crew has left her behind. Held captive on a decadent pleasure station, Zara keeps a journal in which she can reveal her secrets: how her path became entangled in her eccentric family's quest for the solution to time travel, and how an unavoidable tragedy proved to her that spacetime is real, that the future is the past, and that life and the universe are bound in extraordinary ways.

In The Nomad time is fluid, not linear. Zara’s journey is told in alternating timelines, stories that swing around to reconnect events that are woven together to create the complex fabric of her life.