Moving from late-nineteenth-century Ireland to contemporary America, Dorris tells the extraordinary story of Rose Mannion and her descendants. Rose is, as she herself immodestly notes, "a force to behold," with a full head of the blackest hair - a legacy of a shipwrecked Spanish ancestor washed up on a Connemaran shore generations earlier - and an unstoppable will. Even her relocation to a small river town in western Kentucky cannot temper the fire of her nature.

Over a period of more than one hundred years, Rose's legacy of love and betrayal, coupled with the intense internal struggles of family, is passed down from generation to generation. As one character notes tellingly, "The dead are never really quite gone. The influence of their deeds and personalities is always pushing us and nudging us one way or the other."