Ellen is twelve years old, and lives with her sister and two brothers in a big old house in Harlem which also houses her parents' newspaper cuttings library. At the beginning of an idyllic childhood summer in a normal if rather eccentric household, the children are left to their own devices by their distracted and benignly neglectful parents. But the first startling intimation of something going badly wrong is the shock of the accidental serious scalding of the youngest, Carlos, which is linked in Ellen's mind with her own resentful feelings towards her as yet unborn baby sister.
Gradually it becomes clear that something really terrible happened to the family that summer. Neither Ellen's father who is blinded by his passionate sexual desire for his wife, nor the workers in the cuttings library, nor the teacher Ellen turns to for help, recognises what is really going on,a nd finally one evening the unspeakable happens.
Twenty-five years later Ellen, separated from her husband and pregnant after a succession of promiscuous affairs, returns to the family home. A threatened miscarriage confines her to bed, and she spends her time looking at photo albums while the truth of the past gradually unfolds itself, and Ellen finally finds the strength to separate herself from the spirits of the dead.
