In her most ambitious novel to date, Lily King sets her sharply insightful family drama in an upper-middle-class suburb where she traces a complex and explosive father-daughter relationship from the 1970s to the present day.

When eleven-year-old Daley's parents separate, she is thrust into a chaotic adult world of competition, indulgence, and manipulation. Unable to place her allegiance, she gently toes the thickening line between her parents' worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother, and the conservative, liquor-soaked life of her father. But without her mother there to keep him in line, Daley's father's basest impulses are unleashed, and Daley has to choose her own survival over the father she still loves.

As she grows into adulthood, Daley retreats from the New England country-club culture that nourished her father's fears and addictions, attempting to live outside his influence. Until he hits rock bottom. Faced with the chance to free her father from sixty years of dependency, Daley must decide whether repairing their broken relationship is worth losing not only her professional dreams, but the love of her life, Jonathan, who represents so much of what Daley's father claims to hate, and who has given her so much of what he could never provide.