A box of matches is the record of an untumultuous month in the life of Emmett, a forty-five-year-old editor of medical textbooks. Emmett has a wife and children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks. What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett's hearth and home.