The tumble of Gaelic history through the Highland Clearances and the Irish Land Wars provide this novel's momentum. Threaded through the historical drama is a modern American woman's quest for rooted identity and her affair with an Irish Republican. At the story's center is the enigma of Rona, the Selkie. Is she a mythic creature, or the shattered consequence of social injustice? While the ancestral story moves through struggle, loss, and fortitude, the modern story tangles with questions of history's legacy -- how we make choices about what to carry, and how to move forward with inherited burdens of trust.