'So, when I've settled here, in my new and temporary home, when I've begun the process of patching up my own mortality, I'll do my best to put those missing parts of their lives together again. There's a chance that they'll resent my interference, that what was lost or buried is best left that way, but I do this for the three of them - Lydia, Myfanwy and Abigail. Maybe, most of all, for Abigail. If there's any part of her soul in theirs, and surely there must be, then they'll want to hear what I have to tell.'

In 1959, sixty years after leaving her native Ireland, Catherine Hallshead returns to live in Athy very near where she grew up. Her mission is to go through the sixty-nine journals of her life and then write a separate account of what happened when a stranger entered the Quaker Meeting House at Ballitore in January 1899. Joshua Jacob was a charismatic driven man, a preacher for his times, who was determined to set up a splinter group of worshippers called White Friends. Abigail, then married, fell head over heals in love with him. Their love for each other took their lives in directions they never foresaw or forgave. In a painstakingly and yet loving recreation of what happened in the last years of the Victorian era, Catherine sets out a memorial to her dead friend for the children who never knew their mother. She also depicts life in a small town in the late fifties in Ireland, and shows how the curiosity of the townsfolk gradually turns to help and offers of friendship.

Once again John MacKenna has crafted a beautiful and unforgettable love story from the quiet unspoken truths of life. In its own way this is a tribute both to forgotten times and to the dangerous turbulence of religious extremism and unqualified love.