Miss Layla Beck, the daughter of a powerful Senator from Delaware, is forced to get a job with the Federal Writer's Project writing the first official account of Macedonian history. Her notions of real life--the social whirl of Newport and New York--are totally upended when rooms with the overly eccentric Romeyn. The Romeyns are a fixture in the town, their identity tied to its knotty history. As Layla embarks on this grand adventure, her first friend, the town librarian Ms. Betts, wisely cautions: There is a problem with history. All of us see a story according to our own lights. None of us is capable of objectivity. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, this is an intimate novel of love and family, of history and truth, and of struggle and hope, filled with the kind of characters that, once you discover, you'll never forget.