Growing up in the 1930s, Addie Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second World War, believing that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on her grandfather's cattle ranch or in the little town called Sorry twelve bush miles away. Only later will she learn that her grandfather has lived with his own secret torment for more than seventy years. It will take his slipping into blindness and dementia before the dark spectre from his past emerges, leaving her the one responsible for its consequences. And when that day arrives, when Chauncey Beale's past intersects with Addie's present, it will change her future in ways that she, and those she loves, could never have imagined.