The past is a predator. It uniquely knows its prey. Returning to Ireland from exile Catherine Dorgan has a sense that all is not quite right. She cannot dislodge the feeling that something bad is about to happen. And who is the gaunt man in black who seems to follow her everywhere? Is he really there? Catherine doesn’t believe in curses though some say her family name is cursed. The nearest to a curse in her life is seeing both sides to any story. That makes a lonely place of wherever she is. Then she again meets a man with whom contact has been forbidden. But she is a woman with a mind of her own. It is mid-way through 1845 and one of the worst tragedies in the history of Ireland is about to befall the nation in the form of an Gorta Mor, the great hunger, a famine so terrible that it reshapes everything in her country forever, leaving none untouched or unchanged and in the process causing her to question not only what it is be Irish but her own sanity. This is Catherine Dorgan’s story and the story of that famine.