A forced wedding in a freezing country church, where the only sound is the bride's tears: so starts Mary Bicknor's life of misery with the brutish Easter Probert, groom to the oddly assorted Kilminster family. In a tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestuous and sometimes sinister world of rural and small-town border life in the early twentieth century.