Once again Rutherfurd takes us inside the process of history by tracing the lives of several Dublin families from all strata of society, Protestant and Catholic, rich and poor, conniving and heroic. Through the eyes of the victims and the perpetrators alike the painful realities of the anti-Catholic penal laws, the catastrophic famine and the massive migration to North America, the rise of the great nationalists O'Connell and the tragic Parnell, the glorious Irish cultural renaissance of Joyce and Yeats, and finally, the triumphant founding of the Irish Republic in 1922.