Set in the 1930s, the heroine, Flora Poste, having been orphaned, is looking for relatives with which to live. She chooses the Starkadders, relatives on her mother's side, who live in the isolated Cold Comfort Farm, deep in Sussex . Greeting her as "Robert Poste's child", they take her in to repay some unexplained wrong done to her father.

Each of the extended family has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear; and the farm is badly run, supposedly cursed, and presided over by the unseen presence of Aunt Ada Doom, who is said to be mad through having seen "something nasty in the woodshed".

Flora, a level-headed urban woman, applies modern common sense to their problems and helps them all adapt to the twentieth century.

Audiences discovered what happend when Flora discovers a new branch of her family tree
The one with all the nuts