When Hanna Casey discovered her high-flying barrister husband's longstanding affair, she left their London home and returned with her teenage daughter to the little village where she was born, on Ireland's Finvarra Peninsula. Now, after six years living with her widowed mother Mary, Hanna has settled into a dull job as a local librarian in the small nearby town of Lissbeg. On a whim she decides to spend her savings on a renovating a derelict two-room house on a patch of land inherited from her great aunt, and finds herself leading a battle to restore the heart and soul of Lissbeg's fragmented, neglected community. Hanna and those around her begin to rediscover the power of the past, the joys of the present and the courage to believe in the future.