The book opens in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1980, when the author is fourteen years old. She is living with her family on Sugar Beach, in a mansion that has twenty-two rooms. The Coopers are an old family, one of Liberia's oldest and they can trace their ancestry back to the founding fathers of the country. They are part of the country's elite, and very influential. Cooper is empowered by the matriarchal set-up of her family which is headed by her Grandmother, Mama Grand, who is straight talking and no nonsense.
The year in question there was a military coup which toppled the government. Gradually this starts to make an impact in Cooper's life; her Uncle Cecil, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, is executed in a live television broadcast and her home is raided. Cooper's mother sends the children upstairs, to protect them from the soldiers who have forced their way into the home. She is taken down to the basement and raped. The Coopers flee the country, settling in Knoxville, Tennessee, but they are devastated that their foster daughter, Eunice, has to be left behind in Liberia because she is not a blood relative.
Knoxville is a different world for Cooper. Her school life is a paradox; she is bullied for being different and so comes to hate school, but throws herself into her studies to take her mind off her new living situation, and starts to succeed. She is offered a place at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and after graduating with a degree in journalism become a reporter for the New York Times and subsequently for the Wall Street Journal.
Life as a reporter takes Cooper to the other side of the world and throws her back into the kind of war zone she believed she had left behind in her childhood. When she is reporting from Iraq she is almost killed by enemy fire whilst riding in a Humvee. This forces her to address the suppressed emotions she has never dealt with connected to her trauma in Liberia. She realizes that only returning to Sugar Beach will help her deal with the feelings she has been pushing away.
She finds Sugar Beach a different place to the one she had fled. The leader of the barbaric military coup in 1980, Samuel Doe, became president shortly after the death of the then President Tolbert, and civil war continues to rage. Doe was corrupt from the first day of his presidency leaving Liberia with a legacy that reflect the depraved individual that he was. Despite his execution the country has never recovered. One happy event that occurs during her visit is a reunion with her foster sister Eunice, who tell her that she has forgiven her for leaving. The two visit their former home. It stands as a shell of their old life and a symbol of all that has been lost.
