After twenty-one years of complete isolation from her family, Micah (Mike) is at long last going home for a visit. She hasn't been back to the small town of Lytton, Georgia since 1963, when her father, John, kicked her out for her involvement in the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Since then, she has gone on to a successful journalism career, and survived a bitter divorce and a string of short-lived affairs. Now, Mike's spoiled daughter, Rachel, has run away to her ex-husband, her Lower East Side rent has leaped out of her budget range, and her current affair has come to a disastrous end. In the wake of these losses, her estranged sister, DeeDee has telephoned with the news that their father is dying of cancer and that he has asked for Mike. Heading home, Mike is unprepared for a past that has lain in wait for her, all but forgotten over the years. She discovers that sparks still fly between her and Bayard Sewell, the high school sweetheart Mike was supposed to marry, who has stayed in Lytton and is now a fast-rising politician. And the old animosities between Mike and her father seem to have only been exacerbated by his illness; she can't imagine why he ever asked her to come home. But nothing is as it seems in Lytton. As she begins to unravel a plot to seize her family's lands, all the love and desire she thought she had buried long ago is reawakened. In trying to understand her long-forgotten self, Mike finally discovers who it is she wishes to become and what it means to have a place called home.