In the winter of 1924-25, John Lynch, a Brooklyn electrician and bootlegger, loses his wife and youngest daughter in rapid succession, and, overwhelmed, places his four remaining daughters in St. Agatha’s Home in upstate New York. The oldest sister, Kathleen, tries to shepherd her sisters through years at St. Agatha’s, then gives up a religious vocation to marry an aspiring gangster—bargaining, in the process, for secure homes for the other girls. But the bargain soon goes awry, and the girls grow in their separate ways, experiencing their father’s death, their separation, the Depression, World War II, courtships, marriages, children, illness. The sisters’ lives are both commonplace and extraordinary: Lives of aspiration, love and loss.