This charts the lives of a family of exiles, beginning in 1900 and concluding with the days leading up to the Millennium. Anne, the central character, is a cultured English-woman who leaves Europe for the Canadian frontier after serving as a battlefield nurse in World War I. Raised in a family of spiritualists and Fabian socialists, she has fled civilisation in search of a new world. She tries an experimental year of teaching children, and there meets a trapper-homesteader, an Irish immigrant fleeing the 'troubles' in his own violent past. This is a story about the gradual movement of souls from despair and unbelief to faith, hope and love, about the psychology of perception, and the ultimate questions of life, death and the mystery of being.