It is over ten years since the manipulative Sheila Malone tolerated having all her family home in Dublin to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of her second youngest daughter. Yet a further ten years will elapse before they will be together again for another family occasion. During those years three more of her ten children marry and two of her daughters divorce their husbands. Martha Marie takes the reader into the adult lives of ten siblings, an environment she knows well from her own childhood. She explores their relationships with humour and sympathy, and her affection for her native city, Dublin, comes through in all she writes.