The Backyard Tribe concerns a doctor who spends his vacation in Kenya donating his medical services to the needy. While there, he meets a young girl in dire need of heart surgery, and he invites her back to his home in Atlanta for the operation. Discussions with her family get a bit convoluted, though, and her entire tribe ends up making the trip. As the name of the novel implies, the tribe takes over the doctor's backyard, turning it into a Kenyan village, complete with mud huts and cows wrangled from a nearby dairy pasture. According to Publisher's Weekly, "In this offbeat, zany story, Shulman plays off the incongruities and misunderstandings resulting from a clash between cultures [to create a] moving tale."

The Backyard Tribe grew out of Shulman's experiences giving health screenings in Africa and his role as co-founder of Heart to Heart, a program that brings children from Third World countries to the United States for life-saving heart surgery. While he was in Africa, Shulman met with a representative from the Lions Club who told him that one of the group's biggest needs was "to have a place they could send young kids who needed surgery where they could be cured of illnesses they'd otherwise die of, because they didn't have sophisticated facilities and they had very limited resources."