Martha McGill was an ordinary woman. Nothing extraordinary had ever happened to her - until the day of the accident, when she touched the Lucas boy as he lay dying on the tarmac, and they said she saved him. That was the start of it all.

Inheritance changes everything, as Ella Kennedy discovers when her father dies and the farm where she grew up is no longer hers. Angry, following a fight with her brother, Ella leaves her home to join her wild cousin Kitty in Dublin.

It's hard to pretend that everything is normal when your whole life has been turned upside down ... Four children come to terms with their mother's sudden departure.

Alice loves to cook. She believes the secret of good food is to cook with passion. Her love affair with cookery has taken her from her parents' seaside hotel, to Paris and then one of Dublin's finest restaurants. Then she marries Liam, and is happy to hang up her chef's hat and cook for her family and friends instead.

Kate has kept a secret for 25 years which is about to be discovered. Erin is discovering who she really is. Nina's daughter is running off to find a woman she doesn't know. There is no escaping the past. Kate, Erin and Nina all have to come to terms with what happened so many years before, and to find a way of dealing with it.

Esther Doyle is a young Irish girl growing up in a small fishing community in Connemara in the 1950s. Her life is a stable one, bound by the slow rhythms of farming life and the joy of looking after her handicapped sister Nonie. But her existence is horribly changed when she becomes pregnant and is sent to the home for fallen women in Dublin, the Magdalen Laundry...