A woman relinquishes her four-year-old son to tourists passing through town. Losing him, she loses the story of her future. A world away from her, the boy becomes a man without the story of his past. Decades on, the mother struggles on her deathbed to find the story that will release her from life; the son's struggle is for the story that will allow him to live. Not Only the Things That Have Happened is a novel about the stories that make us and break us and then remake us. The novel takes place over a thirty-six hour period, travelling between far-flung places, characters, the past and the future. Time is a character here, revealing that though the story of our present is always told for us, the story of the past and the future is ours to tell.