Wade Jackson, a young man from a Newfoundland outport, hopes to be a writer. In the university library in St. John's, he meets the captivating, South African-born Rachel van Hout, and soon they are lovers. Rachel is the youngest of four van Hout daughters. Her father, Hans, lived in Amsterdam during the Second World War, and claims he was in the Dutch resistance. When the war ended, he emigrated to South Africa, where he met his wife, Myra, had his daughters and worked as an accounting professor at the University of Cape Town. Something occurred, though, that caused him to move his family, unhappily, to Newfoundland. Wade soon finds that Rachel and her sisters are all troubled in their own way. The oldest, Gloria, has a number of broken marriages behind her. Carmen is addicted to drugs. Bethany has anorexia. And then there is Rachel, who reads The Diary of Anne Frank compulsively, and diarizes her days in a secret language of her own making, writing to the point of breakdown and beyond--an obsession that has deeper and more alarming roots than Wade could ever have imagined.