The Second World War is over when Jock moves his family to Quebec, where he lives with his wife, Maura, and their three children in a small bungalow, complains about the government, and tries to teach his children about life and poetry. But beneath the unrippled domestic surface bubble the anxieties and hopes of the women in the family.

Grounded in the texture of everyday life in the 1950s, and echoing the moods of the river itself, LEANING, LEANING OVER WATER recreates in luminous, compelling prose the lives of a family in a village in Canada on the banks of the Ottawa River.