Nuala O'Faolain's autobiography, Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, was a number one bestseller in Ireland for 26 weeks. This book is her first novel.

Kathleen is a travel writer based in London. The office is the nearest thing she has to a home, and her colleagues to friends and a family. And then, on the brink of middle age, the props of her life fall away. She is faced with the frightening imperative of change.

In her crisis she turns to a new kind of writing, and decides to investigate a story about a relationship so passionate that it burned its way across the barriers of class and culture; a true story she had long known in fragments - a scandal that become public when a wealthy Anglo-Irish landlord sought a divorce from his wife on the grounds of her adultery with one of the servants. The affair was played out in 1850s Ireland, against the background of a country devastated by the Famine. Kathleen is Irish herself, but she has not been back to Ireland for almost thirty years. Now, she travels to a remote part of the country to research the story of the lovers.

Thus starts a journey that leads her not only into the historical past, but into a reconsideration of the family she fled years ago. And then she meets a lover of her own who presents her with a choice that could alter her life. As she moves towards her decision she calls on the strengths of her identity as a women, an Irish woman and a woman who is no longer young. And meanwhile, she brings the story of the long-ago lovers to a denouement as tender as it is tragic.