Lily is grappling with her sexual and intellectual desires, while also trying to manage her roles as a mother and a wife in 2016. Vivian Barr is dedicated to helping her husband find success in Watergate-era Washington, D.C. But one night he demands a humiliating favor, and her refusal to obey changes the course of her life --- along with the lives of others. Esther and her uncle’s tribe live a tenuous existence outside the palace walls in ancient Persia. When an innocent mistake results in devastating consequences for her people, she is offered up as a sacrifice to please the King, in the hopes that she will save them all. In THE BOOK OF V., these characters' stories overlap and ultimately collide, illuminating how women’s lives have and have not changed over thousands of years.

In 1917 Beatrice Haven --- the unwed teenage daughter of wealthy Jewish industrialists --- sneaks out of her uncle’s house in the middle of the night in order to abandon her newborn baby at the foot of a pear to tree hoping the girl will be discovered by a poor Irish Catholic family led by headstrong Emma Murphy. Ten years later, Prohibition is in full swing and post-World War I America is in the grips of rampant xenophobia, and Bea’s hopes for her future remain unfulfilled. Seeking a refuge from her unhappiness, she returns to her uncle’s house on Cape Ann. But she discovers far more when the rum-running manager of the local quarry inadvertently reunites her with Emma Murphy and the abandoned child --- now a bright, bold, cross-dressing girl named Lucy Pear --- forever altering the fates of all three women.