Jarring yet slyly comic, Waiting for Rescue evokes a world turned upside down after the events of 9/11 as seen through the eyes of a wry and observant American woman who, though far from the path of the hijacked planes, is thrown into turmoil nevertheless. As a teacher in Boston working with health professionals from around the world, her sudden grief and sense of impending violence gradually pervade every facet of her life and change forever her understanding of the “good works” her colleagues and her students believe they do.

In Honig’s global landscape, the paths of vastly different people crisscross with the narrator’s: a Muslim family in America dealing with cancer, then ethnic profiling; an aging researcher hoping to make his mark in bio-terror’s next big thing; a feisty girl in Kenya whose parents have AIDS; a nerdy high school teacher who commits a terrible crime that returns to haunt, decades later.

Everywhere the author takes us — the classroom and the bedroom, in hallways of hospitals and the offices of ambitious researchers, in the slums of Nairobi and the streets of Boston, at office parties and bedside vigils — events intersect in a unique commentary on the imbalances of our times.