On the morning of her thirty-seventh birthday Louisa Maguire takes a long hard look at her life and doesnt much like what she sees. Her mother didnt want her. Her husband is a womanizer. Her best friend keeps trying to seduce her. All she has left are her two beloved children, a hectic career photographing Dublins beautiful people ... and a longing to turn back time and start all over again. When two long-forgotten faces turn up in her studio, Louisas mind is flooded with memories of her bohemian childhood in New York and of a summer in the Hamptons when she was seventeen. When her first love also arrives in Dublin, Louisas life is turned upside-down and she is forced to confront the devastating truth about why she has always put security before passion and sex before love.