From the seeds of an impoverished boilermaker’s adoration for a rich doctor’s daughter grows a sweeping story of a family whose personal passions are woven into the tapestry of world history.

Harry Short first rides into battle at the beginning of the Boer War, in 1895, to win the heart of Margaret Roll. In 1914 he enlists again, to escape her. With Margaret, he sires a family that takes the reader through generations and across continents. They arrive in Canada as prairie homesteaders, witness the Winnipeg Riot of 1919, and survive the Great Flood of 1950 as well as marriage to bootleggers and communists, police investigation, unlikely heroism on the battlefield, and, all but one, a torpedo.