Growing up in the 1930s, Adeline Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second world war. Addie—as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her—believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on Chauncey's cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town twelve bush miles away, a place called Sorry.

After tragedy strikes her family, Addie holds her sorrows close to her heart. Only later will she learn that her grandfather too has lived with his own secret torment for more than seventy years. It will take his slipping into blindness and dementia for the dark spectre from his past to emerge, 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.