This atmospheric coming-of-age tale follows Ben, a sensitive boy struggling to unravel his family history while caught in the vortex of other people's lives.

Vancouver Island, 1875. Three-year-old Ben comes to live with Agda and her volatile husband James in their small wilderness cabin. Entranced by the lushly overarching rainforest, he helps his loving adoptive mere in the garden, learns his letters at the kitchen table and wonders what it would be like to go to school. When James takes Ben, age nine, on a whisky run, the boy is plunged into the rough world of a ramshackle coastal city. Left alone in a canoe he can barely paddle, he is saved from drowning by a man who is later found dead in the same sea. The frightened boy waits for James to reappear while in the care of James's sweet but listless niece Lily. When James and Ben return to the cabin, they find Agda injured and limping badly. In a few days, Agda is dead. And grieving Ben suspects James of being involved in both sudden deaths.

The nearby Stenhouse farm becomes Ben's refuge, where he helps with chores and grows up alongside their lively children, including spiky, truth-telling Effie. When James dies, seventeen-year-old Ben is offered a home there as the hired man. First, though, he makes the wilderness trek to the city, to give Lily a bequest from James. With the encroaching rainforest and the sea always ready to reclaim the poor streets and crude dwellings of the tumultuous city, Ben gets hopelessly entangled with Lily and other new friends.

The longer Ben stays, the more he learns about his birth mother -- and the farther he is from the Stenhouse farm. Only when he knows who he really is, and frees himself from everyone else's plans for him, can he act on his own desires and claim his place in the world.