1915. A world in the throes of upheaval and change. Irwin Rawson was raised poor on a homestead outside uptight Enderby, Manitoba. As a twelve-year-old, he's tormented by an ugly, dark family secret. Finding himself fatherless, he soon loses his mother and then his home. Expelled from school, dirt mooning under his fingernails, shoveling coal for pennies an hour, Irwin's future is bleak. Ethel Handley is seventeen, just married, and expecting. It's a bad marriage ending in tragedy before she flees Toronto to train as a teacher. Shedding her past, two years later she arrives in Enderby to begin a quiet, blissfully anonymous new life teaching in a one-room school. In a gripping swirl of deprivation and temperance that sweeps through the decade from 1915 to 1925, they come of age in a hard world that threatens to reveal unthinkable truths about each of them -- who they are and where they've come from. Irwin and Ethel collide, then find comfort in their shared torment. Their love story is one for the ages, forbidden and sweet, hidden from view. Until that is impossible. Not even love can keep them together. In the agony of their separation, only one thing is certain… You can't see forever. Even on the prairie.
