A young woman in rural Scotland faces hardship after hardship as she struggles to keep her family farm going through personal losses and the devastation of World War I.
'But for all my reading and schooling, two Chris Guthries there were that fought for my heart and tormented me.'
'You knew you'd never be the same again, but the world went on, and you went with it. So you folded up your dreams and laid them away with the dark quiet corpse that was your childhood.'
'But a worse thing came as slow September dragged to its end. A thing I would never tell a soul. Festering away in the closet of my mind, the memory would lie until it died.'
'It wasn't like waking from a dream, marrying, but more like going into one. And I wasn't sure, not for days, what things we'd dreamt and what actually done.'
'Our best friends were out of Kinraddie now. But we had ourselves. And seeing your Ewan grow straight and strong, with that slim body like his father's, it made a strange dizziness go singing in my heart.'
'Everything I had ever loved and desired went out to the madness beyond the hills on that ill road that flung its evil white ribbon down into the dusk.'
