Celebration chronicles the love affair of a widowed American anthropologist and a Scottish geologist who meet in the British Museum. Set in 1969, the novel also tells the intertwining tales of the couple's diverse cast of friends: a gay English aristocrat and his Hong Kong love, a gargantuan Dinka Jesuit, a sexually subversive editor, a former colonial civil servant, and, as comic relief, an unwitting FBI agent. Despite the fact that these characters live in the most murderous of centuries and that many of them have encountered death in intimate fashion, they all choose to celebrate life. The novel ends with a wedding, a funeral, and a celebration, all in London, though the celebrants travel from countries across the globe. Together they view one of the twentieth century's strangest events, the landing on the moon, a happening which seems to presage an even more displaced future.