Exiled by love, Hazel Rey moves to the historic town of old Adaminaby. A victim of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, the town now lurks, gone but not forgotten, under the waters of Lake Eucumbene.

There, on the shore of the lake, Hazel meets four generations of women sharing one house. Eighty-year-old Esme Windle waits patiently for her turn to die–but a daughter is not meant to go before her mother, and Esme's ancient mother Hortense shows no signs of being finished with living. Esme's neice Byrne and Byrne's daughter, the widowed Lucetta, are succumbing to their own lonely fate. All four seem destined to live in a perpetual aphelion, pulled down by dark regrets and lost love.

But when young Rhett Davys returns to his abandoned family home after the death of his mother, he carries within him a fire that will ignite all of their lives.