Two sisters, Liz and Angie, meet at their deceased parents country house to prepare it for sale. The sisters have never been close, but both are besieged by memories of their childhood and their parents. They are haunted by this house, where their father, a pacifist Unitarian minister, committed suicide. In the end, the sisters reconcile with each other and with the past.

The novel takes place during one week in August 1973, when the sisters are middle-aged, but each chapter ends in a flashback to the years of World War II, when they were adolescents and the family was in turmoil, the father wrestling with his conscience over his pacifism and an affair with a Polish refugee, a son killed in the war, and one daughter sinking into bipolar disorder.