ASTRAY is a sequence of fourteen stories, all with fascinating characters, who are emigrants, runaways, drifters - they cross the borders of race, law, sex and sanity. They have all gone astray. Included are the brutal plot hatched by a slave to set both himself and his master's wife free; the early Puritan community unsettled by an invented sex scandal; and a shocking confession of one soldier's violent betrayal during the American Revolution. These strange, true tales light up four centuries of wanderings, offering a past made up of deviations, and a surprising and moving history for restless times.