In 1913, little Malka Treynovsky flees Russia for America with her family. Yet no sooner do they arrive on Manhattan's squalid Lower East Side, than Malka is crippled and abandoned in the street. Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ices peddler, she manages to survive through cunning and inventiveness. Eventually, she falls in love with Albert, an illiterate radical, and they set off across America in an ice cream truck. Slowly, she transforms into Lillian Dunkle, "The Ice Cream Queen"--doyenne of an empire of ice cream franchises and a celebrated television personality. Lillian's rise to fame and fortune spans seventy years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Yet she is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. And when her past begins catching up with her, everything she has spent her life building implodes spectacularly.