Alan Clay, a struggling American businessman, travels to Saudi Arabia to sell a new technology to the King, only to be challenged by endless Middle Eastern bureaucracy, a perpetually absent monarch, and a suspicious growth on his back.
As her marriage dissolves, a Manhattan writer takes driving lessons from a Sikh instructor with marriage troubles of his own. In each other's company they find the courage to get back on the road and the strength to take the wheel.
Straitlaced Princeton University admissions officer, Portia Nathan is caught off-guard when she makes a recruiting visit to an alternative high school overseen by her former college classmate, the freewheeling John Pressman. Pressman has surmised that Jeremiah, his gifted yet very unconventional student, might well be the son that Portia secretly gave up for adoption many years ago.