We all have a need to belong, to have a place and people we feel tied to: our family, our house, our hometown, our nation. Ever since he first visited Ireland with his family twenty years ago, John McCarthy has felt a strong affinity with its people and landscape. Yet in spite of his Irish name, he never thought of himself as remotely Irish.

When McCarthy sets up home in a wild and isolated corner of County Kerry where his ancestors were living a thousand years before, he realises that he is about to undertake not only a journey into that small rural community but also into his own history and his family. What he discovers there reveals a curious sense of belonging to a place he has never before lived in and peels back the emotional layers of his own fractured past.