My son betrayed me. It is a family tradition.

Didn't I do the same to my father?

The World War intensifies in Europe. In Zurich a writer breathes his last imagining his life till now from his childhood in Dublin.

The voices of his family circling him – wife, son, daughter – carry him to his end as he hears each separate chapter chronicling the power of their passion for their famous father, their love, their hate, their need, their sorrows and joys, their strangeness.

And James Joyce has saved for them one last story to delight and defy them: The Woodcutter And His Children ...