Billy fell in love with a beautiful Irish girl working for a wealthy Park Avenue family. Billy wanted to marry Eva, but then she went back to Ireland. Eva died of pneumonia. Billy never got over it. Billy began courting Maeve not long after, but for the rest of their lives, he, she and Dennis shared a hidden, twisted grief.

On the cusp of fifteen, pretty Theresa is the town's sought-after babysitter - adored by children, but also a solitary soul with an already complex understanding of human nature. During this summer, it is her cousin Daisy, a frail little creature with glittery shoes and worrying bruises that don't heal, in whom Theresa invests her greatest love.

Alice McDermott's masterful novel is a portrait of a working-class American family living through the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth century. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter fruits of the sexual revolution, their older brother, Jacob, finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Clare, the youngest child, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. As their parents, John and Mary, struggle to uphold the family's framework, the four siblings are destined to experience the challenges and liberties of the 1960s. With McDermott's inimitable...