The fourth novel by J. Courtney Sullivan follows in the wake of a string of books on the immigrant experience in America. Drawing on her own Irish Catholic upbringing in the outskirts of Boston, Sullivan charts the journey of Theresa and Nora Flynn, sisters from a rural village in 1950s Ireland, as they settle in the US.

The novel is shaped by two parallel narratives: one when the girls, young and naive, have just arrived in the States, the other 50 years later.