After 10 years in Paris, where she learned photography and became part of the movement that invented modern art, Chicago-born, Irish-American Nora Kelly is at last returning home. Her skill as a photographer will help her cousin Ed Kelly in his rise to Mayor of Chicago. But when she captures the moment that an assassin’s bullet narrowly misses President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and strikes Anton Cermak, she enters a world of international intrigue and danger. Now, Nora must balance family obligations against her encounters with larger-than-life historical characters. She moves through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and World War II, but it’s her unexpected trip to Ireland that transforms her life.

It’s 1903, and Nora Kelly falls for an attractive but dangerous man who sends her running back to the Old World her family had fled. She takes on Paris, mixing with couturiers, artists and "les femmes Americaines" of the Left Bank, such as Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach. But when Nora stumbles into the centuries-old Collège des Irlandais, a good-looking scholar, an unconventional priest and Ireland’s revolutionary women challenge her to honor her Irish blood and join the struggle to free Ireland.