Georgie Swift Symonds is crazy in love with her Wall Street lawyer husband Nick; so "crazy" in fact, that she has paranoiac fantasies that he is unfaithful, and she hounds him with obsessive suspicions. And, she so cherishes her family: her pugnaciously senile grandmother Pem; her TV-celebrity mother Honora; her sister Clare, brother-in-law Donald and two nephews, that she spends much of her time dreading any change or loss in their close intimacy. The three generations of women and the men who have married into the clan live in a family compound on the Sound in Connecticut. Though she is childless and nearly devoid of domestic responsibilities, Georgie doesn't want a job that will remove her from the family nest. She conceives of a project she dubs the Swift Observatory: interviewing people whose lives have been radically altered by sudden tragedy. But try as she might to avoid it, change does come to Georgie and her family in unpredictable ways.