At the age of twenty, Judith Thomas is offered a scholarship to begin a Masters' degree at the University of Aberystwyth, and it is in that year of 2007 that she begins a diary which will record her life until April, 2009. This embraces her discovery of love, the recent economic turmoil, and her musings on topics such as mysticism and our continuing penchant for warfare. Initially reluctant to take up her father's request to translate a 17th century Welsh 'Testament' written by a distant ancestor, Judith finds support in a Welsh language group, leading to the collective unravelling of a story of love, bravery and destruction. Events relating to the execution of purported witches, the English Civil War, and the plague in Eyam are written as if by one who has experienced them first-hand. After completing the translation Judith discovers a lineage of her family living in the same farmhouse as the author of the Testament three-and-a-half centuries before. She also finds that genetic traits of her ancestors have lived on; she and her new-found 'cousin', Ann, share an uncommon ability to read truth or falsehood in people they meet and Ann has the same gift of song as her distant namesake.