After the death of his godfather, Mikel, a would-be revolutionary, inherits the Basque signet ring, a priceless family heirloom that has fascinated and eluded him since he was a child. How did his grandfather— an indentured Basque peasant— acquire such a valuable ring? Different answers lurk in this rich tapestry of family memoirs. The truth— or versions of it— will test Mikel's beliefs in his cause, his family, and himself.
Based on people and events in the author's own family, the overlapping tales move back and forth across time and generations, starting with the reflections of Mikel's great-grandmother Amaia Itsasmendí a Galarza. In the winter of 1939, the irreverent Basque matriarch talks to the photograph of her deceased husband Arturo Quijano as she burns furniture to keep warm during the fascist siege of Madrid. A strange, silent visitor sits with her, knitting and listening as Amaia recounts her days as a farm girl, a daring smuggler, and a maid in the sprawling Quijano de Goñ i mansion. It was here she met and fell in love with Arturo when he was the young man of the house. Born in secret, their son Emmanuel is raised by Amaia's father Patxi, in the emblematic mountain village of Galduamendí .
After a difficult, indentured childhood, Emmanuel, deemed by Patxi as "too clever for his own good," travels with his mother to Madrid. Though he thrives at his father's house, he finds himself caught between his rural Basque roots, his upper-class Spanish life, and his newfound anarchist politics. A violent general strike and an affective indiscretion with Nina, the beguiling daughter of a Spanish army captain, forces him back to Galduamendi. There, his grandfather helps him sneak across the border into Basque France. Ending up in New York City's "Little Spain," he meets and marries Monserrat Romero, a young woman from Puerto Rico who is beautiful, troubled— and pregnant.
Seeking the life of tradition and leisure she once had in Puerto Rico, Monserrat convinces Emmanuel to relocate the family back to Madrid. She leaves first, with their three children in tow. Waiting nervously for her husband to re-join her in the old mansion, she yearns to be a part of the aristocratic world that is rapidly disappearing under the new Republican Spain.
Monserrat's surreptitious return to Puerto Rico in an old tramp steamer is told through the eyes of her rebellious daughter Esmeralda, whose untamed imagination holds the key to her resilience. Young Esmeralda falls under the spell of her mother's Caribbean culture and her family's deep spiritual beliefs. These will form the foundation for the shamanic practices she will develop over the course of her life in New York, Los Angeles, and the small towns of the Northern California coast where she struggles to raise Mikel and her youngest son, Kiko.
Mikel remembers a free-ranging childhood cut short when he is unjustly thrown in juvenile hall. Later, he travels through Latin America. His militancy and disillusionment with the Sandinista Revolution and his brush with death are chronicled alongside the lives of his ancestors, revealing the threads of pride, ingenuity, and trauma that weave through his family history. Ring in hand, his pilgrimage back to his grandfather's village brings an unexpected encounter with the ghosts of his family's past.