Last seen leaving home in Lake Wobegon Days, John Tollefson is now a forty-something bachelor running a public-radio station at a 'mouldering Episcopalian College' in upstate New York. John's tribulations - his gloomy, neurotic staff, his controlling boss, a disastrous speech at a public-radio conference, the bankruptcy of a sweetcorn restaurant in which he is partners with his lawyer, his bumpy relationship with his querulous father - are set alongside his passionate romance with the lawyer's sister Alida Freeman, a Columbia University historian who is writing a book about Abraham Lincoln's holistic healer. First a career crisis, then a family crisis take John back to Lake Wobegon, where the Tollefson family and assorted Lake Wobegon residents past and present - Mr Berge, Dorothy, Florian, Myrtle and Wally - sit in the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox Cafe telling their stories.