The story moves back and forth in time from the arrival of Thea from her
isolated village in arctic Norway in search of a new life in the near
wilderness of a small town and logging camp on the shore of Lake
Superior to the travails of her orphaned son, Odd, some twenty years
later. When Thea's aunt and uncle do not meet her boat as planned, she's
initially left abandoned with no money or prospects and without speaking
the language. Befriended by a local businessman and apothecary with
secrets of his own, she obtains work as a cook in the nearby logging
camp. While living through one of the coldest and threatening winters in
memory, she is raped by an itinerant peddler and petty criminal. She
delivers the baby in a blinding snowstorm the next fall, attended by her
original benefactor and his daughter, who is also the town's surgeon and
midwife, but she soon dies of childbirth complications. The apothecary,
Grimm, takes the infant into his household and the boy is raised more or
less by the entire town, eventually growing up under Grimm's influence
to be a fisherman, smuggler for Grimm's whiskey trade, and a boat
builder. Still, he struggles to find himself and to reconcile the loss
of his mother, and he becomes increasingly troubled by Grimm's criminal
enterprises and dirty secrets until an unlikely love affair puts
everything on a collision course.
