Although the events surrounding Captain Charles Boycott that brought him to international attention occurred in 1879–80, the novel has parallel narratives alternating between this period and approximately thirty years earlier. The story centres on two brothers, Owen and Thomas Joyce, and begins when they are youths in 1848, at the height of The Great Famine. As the boys struggle to survive, their experiences (involving, among other things, coffin ships, workhouses and cannibalism), profoundly shape their attitudes in different ways towards landlordism and Irish freedom from British imperialism.