This is the story of four sisters - educated, upper middle-class - whose comfortable lives and careers are driven in unconventional directions and with a fatalistic urgency by the sudden death of their youngest sister. The story is set in Northern Ireland in the years immediately following the Irish Civil War (1922) where their father is a magistrate appointed by the British Crown while their mother and her family - old Celtic nobility - are dedicated to ridding the country of the foreign occupier. The novel portrays the conflicts when the daughters choose careers and make life choices that are radically different from the values that their ultra-Catholic mother expects from her girls. The novel takes the reader from life in the anything-goes art community of Paris' Left Bank to a convent where the most brilliant girl decides to become an atheistic Communist; from a scandalous affair and out-of-wedlock pregnancy to manning a Lewis machine gun ambushing British troops. The O'Neill girls are anything but dull and conventional ─ but then neither is their devoutly Catholic mother.
While one sister is living the artist's life in The City of Light, her sisters are not exactly conforming back in Ireland
The bright and gaudy lights of Blackpool - setting of a scandalous assignation - provide a stark contrast to the austere determination on the faces of the Cumann na mBan (the woman's revolutionary army) that another sister seeks out.
