This debut novel by Rosalie Osmond is set in Waldenstein, a tiny, isolated German community in early 20th-century Nova Scotia, where settlers survive lives of intolerable hardship through their unquestioning belief in a pre-Enlightenment Lutheranism. But when the most prominent man in the community fathers the child of his neighbour’s daughter, Erika, and a new clergyman from Europe arrives to shake the certainties of faith, their firm ideas are overturned. Erika flees to England, to encounter her own uncertainties there, and years later her son, obsessed with finding his father, comes back to confront both the changing world of Waldenstein and his half-siblings.