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Kathleen de Burca 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 a quick series of blows strips away the props of her life, revealing the painful cost of her refugee existence, and 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 has long known in fragments - the scandalous affair between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant in Ireland in the 1850s, years marked by the devastation of the potato famine.
After an absence of thirty years, Kathleen returns to Ireland to research the story of the lovers and begins a journey that leads her not only into the historical past, but into a reconsideration of the family she fled years ago. During her time in the country, she meets a lover of her own who presents her with a choice that promises to alter the course of her life. As she moves toward her decision, she calls on the strengths of her identity as a woman, an Irish woman, and a woman who is no longer young. And meanwhile, she brings the story of the two long-ago lovers to a denouement as tender as it is tragic.
