If you inherited ten million dollars would you tell your family? Someone doesn't. This novel is in two parts, The Past and The Present. Part 1 starts in the mid nineteenth century and gives readers a unique insight into the lives of two very different families. Five generations of the Collins family work in the Guinness Brewery as coopers. We relive what life is like in the tenements of Dublin, infamous for the perfectly hellish conditions under which its people are housed from the mid eighteenth century. We witness the widespread destruction of Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Civil War and the notorious Black and Tans era as the Collins family go about their daily lives.The second family who move in New York's wealthy society are descendants of Mary O'Brien who left her native County Kerry for America in 1845 on one of the dreaded famine ships. After working in domestic service, she has a disastrous marriage and is abandoned by her husband. She educates herself, graduates from college and makes a name for herself fighting womens rights. She remarries a successful New York senator who, amongst other things, distinguishes himself on the Union side in the American Civil War. These two families eventually connect in extraordinary circumstances when American millionaire recluse, Jack Colbert, great grandson of Mary O 'Brien bequeaths ten million dollars to his dead daughter's heir. In Part 2, we move to the present day and discover who eventually gets the inheritance which becomes a dilemma for the recipient. We get an insight into the exciting world of advertising, made popular recently by the Mad Men TV series. Jenny Boland and her husband, Andrew, live in Dublin. After surviving catastrophic injuries in a motor accident, we follow Andrew as he builds his own advertising agency. Jenny sets up her own wedding planner business but she and her son, Adam, have to deal with their own problems.