When Mercia realizes that her husband has forever left her, abandoning their life together in Scotland, she is faced with a tough decision, to stay or to leave. She ends up deciding that, if she is going to single, she wants to at least be in her community, so after 25 years, she decides to re-immigrate to her home country, South Africa.
She finds that the family has become riddled with issues. There are social issues that keep her family permanently stressed, and of course the difficult history of South Africa keeps the family in a tragic mood, so when she arrives, she finds that many of them are openly alcoholic. Over the course of her time there, she slowly begins to realize that there are many closet alcoholics too, and other kinds of addictions in her community.
She struggles to find meaning in light of the damage in her community, given her own loneliness and occasional despair. In an effort to understand things better, she learns more about her father, about his own difficult life. He shares stories with her that she didn't know, and then the novel ends, rather unceremoniously. She gets a teaching job, but she decides she has to make another decision: Should she stay in South Africa, or should she leave again?
