Move away, run away, wash up on a strange shore and the room is the same. It will always be the same room. The same problems in a new arrangement. Funny, sorrowful and filled with love and life, this beautiful and beguiling memoir goes in search of what we keep behind the doors of the past, how it haunts the present and what it takes to make sense of it all. Helen Longstreth's chaotic childhood: the relentless cycle of her father's alcoholic relapses, the six kids coming and going, the abject apologies and uncertain forgiveness, the meals that bring the family back together again. But while she is studying in America, the land of her parents' birth, her father dies - and it all comes to an abrupt end. In the years that follow, she is drawn back to America and another world of chaotic love and alcoholic madness, dying fathers and lost boys. The same problems in a new arrangement.

Ten years after her father's death, Helen returns to her childhood home to spend a rainy summer with her mother, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. Her father's office, his briefcase, and his desk - all untouched since his death - loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers.