Lindy has the summer of a lifetime planned at her family’s beloved cottage in Summerland Cove, Maine, where she’s spent summers all her life and where she and her husband David met as teenagers. She’s slated big events three weekends in a row: David’s 50th birthday party, her parents’ 50th anniversary party and her oldest daughter Hailey’s wedding. But when David doesn’t show up for his own party, everything about the life they’ve created together is thrown into question. Has he been in an accident? Or is it something more cliché --- a midlife crisis, an affair? Surely, he’ll show up for his beloved daughter’s wedding --- won’t he? The agonizing days tick by and still no David. Lindy’s four nearly grown children are panicked. Lindy struggles to remain calm, even as long-buried details of the family’s past begin to surface.

In 1924, four-year-old Cecily Larson’s mother reluctantly drops her off at an orphanage in Chicago. Three years later, Cecily is sold to a traveling circus to perform as the “little sister” to glamorous bareback rider Isabelle DuMonde. But as the years go by, the cracks in her little world begin to show. And when teenage Cecily meets and falls in love with a young roustabout named Lucky, she finds her life thrown onto an entirely unexpected --- and dangerous --- course. In 2015, Cecily is now 94 and living a quiet life in Minnesota. But when her family decides to surprise her with an at-home DNA test, the unexpected results not only bring to light the tragic love story that Cecily has kept hidden for decades but also throw into question everything about the family she has raised and claimed as her own for nearly 70 years.

Ellen Baker's new novel is a sweeping multigenerational saga of the searing power of war, memory, friendship and family.