Orphaned at a young age, Cahal Kinsella returns from an industrial school in Letterfrack to the small farming village of Caherlo, Co. Galway to his tyrannical grandfather, and must assert his individuality if he is to have any hope of freedom from his misery.

Walter Macken paints a haunting and memorable portrait of the hard life of subsistence farming, of loveless arranged marriages, and of rebellion against suffocating social mores.