From the National Book Award-winning author comes a luminous, deeply humane novel about three generations of an Irish immigrant family in 1940s and 1950s Brooklyn. For those who love Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, and Anne Tyler.

On a gloomy February afternoon, Jim sends his wife Annie out to do the shopping before dark falls. He seals their meager apartment, unhooks the gas tube inside the oven, and inhales. Sister St. Saviour, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, catches the scent of fire doused with water and hurries to the scene: a gathered crowd, firemen, and the distraught young widow. Moved by the girl's plight and her unborn child, the wise nun finds Annie work in the convent's laundry, where, in turn, her daughter will grow up amidst the crank of the wringer and the hiss of the iron. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame are prevalent.