In the deserted rooms above Hewitt's Shoe Repairs and Fittings, seventy-two-year-old Winifred Foy has sought refuge. Abandoned time and again throughout her life, Winnie lives in a delicate world of exile and isolation, until she is robbed of her only material possessions: a suitcase and a wig. On a journey to find the thief, Winnie enters her unbound world and pieces together the fragments of her life, from her childhood in the 1930s, to the dislocation caused by the Second World War, to the memory of her first love. Winnie's once secluded world beings to fill with people, and with ghosts, including her devoted but quixotic father, the haunting figure of her mother, her domineering grandfather and her spinster aunt. Time and memory are eerily fluid, and Winnie is forced to confront the layered shadows of her former self.