Eleanor Merritt is a family planning worker in Kenya, who falls in love with Calvin Piper, an intellectual and scientist with some controversial ideas about population control in the poor. The book is clearly well researched, examining the pros and cons of family planning, population control and the AIDS epidemic. Shriver manages to make an interesting storyline out of it - the love story is fortunately the backdrop for the majority of the book, rather than the foreground. Would have scored higher if she had not tried to work in a very tenuous (and unnecessary) ghost story into the plot, and the ending could have been better. Worth a read though, and definitely gets you thinking.