Rachel Isaacson, spirited, otherworldly and haunted, is born into a rigidly Old World family in New York’s Lower East Side. Hungry for independence, Rachel enters a marriage of convenience with violent consequences. Across the Atlantic, storyteller, fiddler and cliff climber Ciaran McMurrough is raised in pastoral innocence on Rathlin off the coast of Ulster. His upbringing in a tight-knit, isolated community leaves him unprepared for the subtle political passions following the Irish Civil War. Outcasts-one by choice, one by chance-Rachel and Ciaran meet on the docks of lower Manhattan in 1928. Drawn to each other in this lyrical story, must they repeat a doomed cycle as eternal lovers?