For Iris, childhood memories are of long hot summers spent playing with her cousin Rosmarie in her grandmother's garden, a place where redcurrants turned to pale tears on the branches of trees and beautiful Aunt Inga shook sparks from the tips of her fingers. But now her grandmother is dead and, along with inheriting the property, Iris finds that she also inherits her family's darkest secrets. Reluctant to keep it, but reluctant to sell, Iris spends one more summer at the house. By day she swims at the local lake, where she rediscovers a childhood companion. Alone at night she roams through the familiar rooms, exploring the tall black shadows of the past. In the flicker between remembrance and forgetting, Iris recalls an enigmatic grandfather who went to war and came back a different man, the night her cousin Rosmarie fell through the conservatory roof and shattered her family's lives, and a moment of love that made all the trees in the orchard bloom over night.

Und tritt dort ihr Erbe an — das Haus der verstorbenen Grobmutter. In Bootshaven wird Iris unweigerlich in Familiengeheimnisse eingeweiht und zugleich von ihren Erinnerungen heimgesucht: der fruhe Tod ihrer damaligen Freundin, die schwierigen Familienverhaltnisse ihrer Mutter und Tanten… Doch nicht nur Vergangenes wird erzahlt — die Liebesgeschichte zwischen Iris und ihrem Anwalt, einem Kinderfreund, rundet die poetisch-schone Geschichte ab.