Two women--one American, the other Irish-- trade houses for the summer and the resulting change of scenery helps them remake their lives. The American is Marilyn of Connecticut, mourning the death of her son, the Irish woman is Ria of Dublin, a mother of two, whose husband had an affair and made the woman pregnant. By the author of The Glass Lake.

In 1981, the height of Ireland's "Troubles, " eighteen-year-old Fergus is distracted from his upcoming A-level exams by his imprisoned brother's hunger strike, the stress of being a courier for Sinn Fein, and dreams of a murdered girl whose body he discovered in a bog.

B wonders about a zombie outbreak in Ireland and finds himself struggling for survival while forging precarious alliances in the serpentine corridors of his high school.