A boy encounters unfamiliar areas in his hometown; witnesses older boys in a sexual encounter; gets caught up in a neighborhood gang crabapple fight--and discovers how attractive and exciting these dangers can be. A trio of young mill workers watches one of their high school friends play in a Super Bowl game and have to confront the comparisons with what they've made of their own lives. The young abused wife of a policeman finds herself the keeper of her paraplegic husband after a car accident and learns that love can take many forms. An old woman rattles through the rooms of her big house late at night and confronts a young intruder in her kitchen. A husband, while knitting a fabric of lies to make time to see his girlfriend, realizes he loves his wife but that the heart has reasons that even the heart doesn't understand.

In the thirteen stories of Holding On we see life in Furnass during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time of prosperity for a Western Pennsylvania mill town, though there are intimations of change, rumors of mill closings, layoffs. Two hundred years earlier in this same area, two Scottish soldiers of the Black Watch, part of Colonel Bouquet's expedition into the uncharted Ohio Territory to retrieve Indian captives, struggle through the virgin forest along the Allehela River looking for lost sheep.

The story of the two Scottish soldiers--their struggle with the limitless unforgiving foreign landscape; conflicting clan loyalties; and the continual threat of attack from Indians--interweaves among the stories of later-day Furnass, creating a collective portrait of people, then and now, as life changes about them, doing their best to hold on.