From back cover: A ... story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. It is the early 1990s, and Helen ... , her mother Lily, and her grandmother Dora, have come together in a crumbling old house along Ireland's coastal southeast to tend to Helen's adored brother Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With two of Declan's friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other.