One rainy afternoon in Istanbul a woman walks into a doctor’s surgery. ‘I want an abortion,’ she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that day will change her life, and the lives of everyone around her.

Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. A mysterious curse causes all the men to die by the age of forty-one, so it is a house of women, among them her beautiful, rebellious mother, Zeliha, clairvoyant Auntie Banu and bar-brawl widow, Auntie Cevriye. But when Asya’s Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long-hidden family secrets connected with Turkey’s turbulent past begin to emerge.