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

Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse all the Kazanci men die early in their forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya's beautiful, rebellious mother, Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. And when Asya's Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to visit to trace her family's heritage, long-hidden secrets and Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge.