The year is 1958, and Sister Alphonsine, a nun in a community of teaching nuns dominated by an authoritarian Reverend Mother, is sent away for re-education because her transgressions against the Holy Rule have caught up with her. In a richly detailed portrait of convent life, the story unfolds of her gradual emergence back into the same restricted milieu as the world outside moves on with the onset of a new decade and changes within the Church shakes its foundation. The restless students in St. Monica?s Girls? School, where the nuns teach, burst through the careful armour the nuns have had to build around themselves as they too confront the swinging sixties.