Hungry Hill is a family saga of epic proportions, based on the Irish ancestors of Daphne du Maurier’s friend Christopher Puxley. The story spans the years 1820-1920 and follows the lives of five generations of a family of Irish landowners called Brodrick who live in a castle called Clonmere in Southern Ireland. The book is divided into five sub-books and an epilogue and each part deals with the life of the main character of each successive generation. The story is enormously detailed and includes numerous characters, which can lead to confusion as each generation of the family tend to have the same names.