The burning house -- The airport -- The global marketplace -- The multiculture -- The games -- The empire -- The alien home.

Beginning in Los Angeles International Airport, where town life--shops, services, sociability--is available without a town, Pico Iyer takes us on a tour of the transnational village our world has become. From Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels, to Atlanta's Olympic Village, which seems to inadvertently commemorate a sort of corporate universalism, to Japan, where in the midst of alien surfaces his apartment building is called "The Memphis," Iyer ponders what the word "home" can possibly mean in a world whose face is blurred by its cultural fusion and its alarmingly rapid rate of change.