Pumkin Patterson is a thirteen-year-old girl living in a tiny two-room house in Kingston, Jamaica, with her grandmother (who wants to improve the family’s social standing), her Aunt Sophie (who dreams of a new life in Paris for her and Pumkin), and her mother Paulette (who’s rarely home). When Sophie is offered the chance to move to France for work, she seizes the opportunity, and promises to send for her niece in one year’s time....

When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive. Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets.

The story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the 18th century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they - and she - will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans.

On an ordinary day in an upscale Atlanta suburb, Maya is making breakfast for her two sons, when her husband drops a red-and-blue striped envelope on the counter and asks a devastating question: Who is Sunny? Maya is sent reeling back to her childhood in Guyana—a time when Sunny was her only name. Unbeknownst to her husband, Maya is not who she claims to be. The letter, from her long-lost sister Roshi, now threatens to expose her true identity and shatter the seemingly perfect existence Maya worked so hard to build.

Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father’s violence and their mother’s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home. But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know—and reckon with a family secret buried in the past.