When Edward de Salis travels to America after the death of his first wife, he is astonished to find himself falling in love with Marguerite, a young woman many years younger than him. Full of hope for the future, Edward returns to his Irish estate known as Cashelmara. but finds his family trapped in the sinister spiral that comes with the poverty and famine striking nineteenth-century Ireland. follows three generations of fortunes as they struggle to survive the tragedies of histories and their own chaotic lives.