There are five Mundy sisters and they are all as yet unmarried. Kate, Maggie, Agnes, Rosie and Christina live in a cottage outside the town of Ballybeg, in County Donegal, and they are all supported by Kate, who, as a school teacher, is the only one of the family with a job that pays well. Agnes and Rose are the Etsy entrepreneurs of their day, knitting gloves that they sell in town, which brings in enough housekeeping for Maggie and Christina to look after the house and buy food for the family, which includes Michael, Christina's seven year old son.
Jack Mundy has only recently returned home, but he, too, is unable to contribute financially to the family pot. He has spent twenty five years as a missionary in Uganda, but has contracted malaria one of the side effects of which seems to be frequent amnesia. There are days when he cannot even remember his sisters' names. He has also strayed from his strict Catholic routes and talk is that he "went native", which is really why he had to return to Ireland.
The only member of the family who is not Irish is Michael's father Gerry. He is Welsh, and although perfectly personable is completely unreliable. He works as a traveling salesman and sells gramophones. He is barely home.
The sisters are unfulfilled in their lives. All hoped for love but none of them really found it. None are married. They are also financially strained which is a drain on their energies much of the time. Each looks back fondly at a love that might have been, and seems sad that it never was. However, out of the blue, Gerry proposes to Christina, and it seems as though he might - for once- be serious. It emerges that he will still not be around very much. Bored with selling gramophones he has a yearning for adventure and has decided that the best way to find it is by joining the International Brigade and going to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Kate is wildly opposed to this; upright and very Catholic, she disapproves of the "Godless forces" that he will be fighting with because Franco, the Spanish dictator he will be fighting, has the backing of the Catholic church.
Economic issues continue to plague the sisters. The opening of a large knitwear factory in town kills off the home made gloves industry. Kate is also laid off, because there are not enough children attending the local school to justify keeping more than one teacher. Kate is suspicious of this reasoning and privately blames her brother Jack's dubious behavior as a missionary for her termination; she feels that his actions have tainted her by association in the eyes of the church, who run the little school. Things are not well in the Mundy house and Michael, in his role as the adult narrator, tells us that this is the summer in which things are forever changed, and that the existence they have enjoyed for all these years comes to an end.
