Major Coote has recently moved his somewhat reluctant family from their comfortable London home to a run-down Irish demesne in pursuit of his grandiose farming dreams. His neighbors, the OConnors, are struggling with the problems of raising a large, strong-willed brood. Relations between the two families become strained when the OConnors acquire the Grey Knight, a Jack B. Yeats painting which Major Coote believes to have been stolen from his mansion. Then seventeen-year-old Hugh OConnor meets Hazel, the Majors beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, and trouble mounts, with unforeseen tragic consequences. Set in Connacht in 1981, a time of rising tensions and sporadic violence brought about by the Northern Ireland hunger strikes, this novel delineates the fragility and wonder of first love.