In this triumphant conclusion to the Lavette saga, Howard Fast brings the story up to the present, to the fourth generation. As Dan Lavette dominated "The Immigrants", so his eldest child, Barbara, is the focus of this wide-ranging and passionate novel.

After a life filled with danger, love and death, Barbara, now in her sixties, is living a simple life in San Francisco. And then, almost on a whim, she runs for Congress and sets in motion a series of adventures that brings her back to the excitement of the times, to a renewal of romantic love, to mortal danger as a reporter in Central America, to loss and tragedy, and in the end, to an exultant embracing of life.