After her parents drown in the flooded Massacre River that marks the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, young Haitian Amabelle Desir becomes a housemaid to Dominican landowner Don Ignacio, and a companion to his daughter, Valencia. As the book opens, Valencia and Amabelle are grown women, and Amabelle attends the birth of Valencia's twins. Valencia is now married to a Dominican army officer seeking to rise in the ranks, and he is soon assigned to assist in the brutal slaughter of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

Amabelle's lover, Sebastien, works in Ignacio's sugar cane field, a brutal job known to workers as "farming the bones" because of its killing, exhausting harshness. 

Amabelle has a pleasant but distant relationship with the family she serves, and the novel juxtaposes her moments in their home with her conversations with other Haitian workers in the cane fields...