Are you as open-minded, as trusting, as loyal as you think you are? Like the Renaissance painting which fascinates Kate, The Fisher Child is in three parts. In Part One, Kate is happily married to Dan, both of them second-generation Irish and comfortable in their middle-class north London lives. They have two children, a boy and a girl, with another one on the way. But when Meg is born, Dan cannot accept her as his child, and retreats to Ireland in bewilderment. In Wexford, his father and cousins are partaking in the commemoration of the 1798 Rebellion, and he learns about his ancestor Hugh Byrne, a rebel who was forced to flee Ireland. Dan will never know the true story of Hugh Byrne, which the reader discovers in Part Two, but beneath the shadow of the mountain where his family once lived, his dreams bring him deep into his genetic inheritance, forcing him to question the identity he has always taken for granted.