Celebration chronicles the love story of a widowed American anthropologist and a Scottish geologist as well as the intertwining tales of the couple's eccentric circle of friends, which include a homosexual English aristocrat, a gargantuan African Jesuit, an editor of pornographic literature, and an overzealous CIA agent. Despite the fact that these characters live in the most murderous of centuries and have all reckoned with death in some intimate fashion, they choose to celebrate life over death.

Set in 1969, this joyful novel ends with a wedding, a funeral, and a celebration--all in London, though the celebrants hail from around the globe. Together they view the twentieth century's strangest event--the landing on the moon--a happening which seems to presage an even more displaced future.