The novel explores the relationship between people and their things. In a consumer culture, if a person wants an object to symbolize their life, they are likely to point to a significant, usually expensive thing that suggests the worth and value of a life well lived: jewelry, clothes, perhaps a luxury car or a fine home. Anthony Peardew, however, spends his life collecting what is essentially trash—objects he finds dropped in the streets that strangers have lost often accidentally, things with no inherent value save that they were part of a dramatic life moment: hair clips, a doll’s head, plastic toys, keys, tea cups, tweezers, a jigsaw puzzle piece. The most tectonic emotional experiences—life-altering experiences of love and loss, joy and tragedy—are encapsulated in these objects that just happen to be in the same place, at the same time as when the experiences happen.

When Laura first enters Padua’s mysterious study—when she first wanders about Anthony’s “salmagundi,” as he terms it—she begins to appreciate the importance of such ordinary objects and the all but impossible task of reuniting those lost objects with owners who relish their importance and most likely rue their loss. What Anthony collects are of no quantifiable monetary value.