In 1973, sixteen-year-old Violet O’Halloran travels from New York to Ireland with her mother to spend a summer month with her grandmother in the tiny village of Castlemacross. When her grandmother dies suddenly, Violet’s mother, overwhelmed with new responsibilities, leaves her temporarily with the nuns at a convent school in the north, empty during the summer, except for Indira Sharma, a blind girl from India, with whom Violet forms an intense bond. Both are strangers to Ireland and both have embattled relationships with their Irish mothers. Indira confides in Violet that she is in a romantic relationship with her cousin, whom she affectionately calls Ishta Devta, which means Favorite Deity in Sanskrit. When Indira discovers a devastating family secret, she tries to share it with Violet but is prevented from doing so. Violet worries that a figure she sees one night walking alone on the beach in the distance, is Indira. The tide at that hour is high and Indira drowns.

Thirteen years later Violet meets an Irishman, Emmett Fitzroy, at a party in New York City and, after becoming romantically involved with him, learns that he was Indira’s cousin (whom she had called Ishta Devta). He invites her to spend a few weeks by herself at his old Anglo Irish house overlooking the north channel of the Irish Sea. When she arrives, she is warned by the caretaker not to go to the water-damaged third floor, which has been left unrepaired for over a decade. There Violet discovers a repository of family secrets- including the shocking revelation that Indira had once tried to share with her. The novel explores place, displacement and exile, and ways in which the personal and the political are inseparable.