Seventeen-year-old Beatrice thinks that she and her best friend Miriam will always lead ordinary lives on Sweet Camellia Island off the coast of Louisiana. Everyone on the three-square-mile island works for the Theriot Pepper Sauce Company, lives in the company housing, and buys groceries at the company store.

As the United States prepares to enter World War I, Beatrice’s father warns her that to leave the island would be foolish. His words are borne out when the Spanish Flu rips across the country a year later.

The owner of the pepper sauce company, Mr. Theriot, isolates the island, protecting the residents from the pandemic.

After the tumult of the war and the pandemic are over, Beatrice marries her high school sweetheart, Lionel, and Miriam weds Emile Theriot, the son of the company owner. They settle down to the quiet life Beatrice expected.

Beatrice joins her mother working in the island library, while Lionel becomes the Theriots’ handyman. But her husband is not happy on the island and when he wants to leave, he upends her life and his in ways neither of them expected.

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