Kelly Adams is a musically gifted orphan from Romania, studying the performing arts in a small private school in the Alberta badlands. Tanner Kounz is a talented actor and playwright, who has just been given the most important writing assignment of his career. Kyle Teller is a deaf instructor of American Sign Language, trying to cope with the traumatic events which robbed him of his hearing. Maya Carpenter is a drug addict with a life in shambles. And Cassie Hudson is an exhausted single mother and high school dropout, working double shifts at a 24-hour roadside gas station. When reclusive novelist Max Kordon wins the coveted Klondike Fiction Prize, his acceptance speech is witnessed by viewers from across the nation, most of whom have never seen him before. But his words and face are sufficient to send shockwaves through five unrelated lives, bringing to light his hidden past, as well the largely forgotten life of a man named Stanley Harmon, whose special birthday present for Kelly was never delivered.