This family saga follows the Brodrick family in Ireland across several generations in the nineteenth century. Copper Brodrick builds his fortune from a mine on Hungry Hill, a mountain above the family estate, and fights a long feud with a neighbouring family. As the years pass, the mine and the land shape the fortunes, marriages and quarrels of his descendants. The novel explores ambition, inheritance and the weight of the past, set against the Irish landscape and a changing social order.