This is the story of Ellen 'Rua' O'Malley, the twenty-six-year-old wife of a poor tenant farmer, and her fight for survival against an unrelenting plague that sweeps a wasted land; and of a tyrannical landlord system which rules with a heart of stone. It is August 1845. In Dublin's Botanic Gardens, Phytophora infestans is discovered for the first time. The bacteria was to result in the Great Famine, an event of holocaust proportions that affected every man, woman and child in Ireland. England's shame; Ireland's tragedy. Ellen O'Malley is one such victim. She loses her husband, is duped into going to Australia to lead a better life, leaving behind three of her beloved children. She travels aboard a coffin ship and arrives emaciated and ill with her new baby. But Ellen, a woman with an indomitable spirit, rises above her oppression and eventually returns to wreak revenge on those perpetrators of her misery.