It is over ten years since the manipulative Sheila Malone tolerated having all her family home in Dublin to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of her second youngest daughter. Yet a further ten years will elapse before they will be together again for another family occasion. During those years three more of her ten children marry and two of her daughters divorce their husbands.
As Sheila's children mature, their lives and relationships evolve and flourish, and they cease to be afraid of their mother. On occasion, they even manipulate her. In her usual self-centred and selfish way, Sheila continues to enjoy life with her friends. When one of her friends dies, she embraces two new ones.
New on the scene, Charlie dislikes her but becomes very friendly with her children, and very fond of them, as they do of him.
Martha Marie takes the reader into the adult lives of ten siblings, an environment she knows well from her own childhood. She explores their relationships with humour and sympathy, and her affection for her native city, Dublin, comes through in all she writes.