While sitting in traffic, an unbidden thought comes to Frances Moon. “I lost a baby when I was nineteen.” She is surprised by her own voice as she speaks the thought aloud to Ian, her partner of twenty years. The next morning, Ian is gone. Numbed by abandonment, Frances sets out for the small town in western Canada where she grew up. The novel flashes back to Frances as an imaginative and well-loved little girl who begins to lose herself once forced from her family’s idyllic farm. As she withdraws, only two people offer comfort: Dooley Sullivan, an older troublemaker, and Silas Chance, a Native American and WWII vet. Silas dies violently, the victim of a hit-and-run. In such a small town with the usual racial prejudices, the case is never solved. But years later, on the evening of her marriage, Frances knows who the driver was. And possibly, so does Dooley.

Juliet, Saskatchewan, is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of town. It’s easy to believe that nothing of consequence takes place there. But the hills vibrate with life, and the town’s heart beats in the rich and overlapping stories of its people.