In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions are still felt to the present day. Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process, she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious deaths of two young girls. As the novel depends, the triangle of principal, teacher, student opens out into other emotional triangles - aunt, niece, lover; mother, daughter, granddaughter - until a sudden, capsizing love thrusts Anne herself into a newly independent life. This spellbinding tale - set in Saskatchewan and the Ottawa Valley - crosses generations and cuts to the bone. It probes the roots of obsessive love and hate, and celebrates the process of becoming who we are in a world full of startling connections that lie just out of sight.