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This work is set in travel and its concurrent happenings. A couple marries on a ship, and professional as well as personal experiences unfold. On a practical level, journeying comprises the characters' work, while on other levels, it symbolizes everyone's movement through life. The book is crowded with life lessons told through anecdotes of marriages, friendships, love affairs, births, deaths, separations, encounters with customers, and coming into ports in real and symbolic ways. The interaction of the social, professional, sexual, procreational, spiritual, conscientious, and lewd behaviors during the trips symbolize human behavior on the journey through life and its many possible outcomes. Every main character has a "gray area"—usually not defined as "good" or "bad," but often morally ambiguous—that the author presents as practical or integral parts of their journey.
This massive work is a tour de force for a person who is full of stories and was encouraged to write them (albeit, as the author admits, in somewhat fictionalized form) by the people who have heard them. It was also an impressively difficult mission for the author since English is not his first language. During the COVID-19 "idleness," he challenged himself to commit his stories to a manuscript in ways that would be more entertaining when fictionalized, as well as permit him to protect those involved by disguising them. He writes that it is his hope "to open minds ... but ... not endeavor to alter basic human values that benefit the peaceful coexistence of the human race, regardless of geographic locations."