Home isn't always where the heart lies. Irwin Rawson was raised poor on a homestead outside uptight Enderby, Manitoba. Troubled by an ugly, dark family secret, he finds himself fatherless, then soon loses his mother and his home. Expelled from school, dirt mooning under his fingernails, shoveling coal for pennies, 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, she arrives in Enderby to begin a quiet, blissfully anonymous new life teaching in a one-room school. As grim deprivation and strict temperance grip the decade from 1915 to 1925, they come of age enduring a hard world threatening 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.