When Maude Chambliss first arrives at Retreat, the seasonal home of her husband's aristocratic family, she is a nineteen-year-old bride fresh from South /Carolinas' Low Country. Among the patrician men and women who reside in the summer colony on the coast of Main, her gypsy-like beauty and impulsive behavior immediately brand her an outsider. She, as well as everyone else, is certain she will never fit in. And of course, she doesn't ... at first. But over the many summers she spends there Maude comes to cherish life in the colony, as she does the people who share it with her. There is her husband Peter, consumed with a darkness of spirit; her adored but dangerously fragile children; her domineering mother-in-law, who teachers that it is the women who posses the strength to keep the colony intact; and Maine native Micah Willis, who is ultimately Maudes's truest friend.