Mrs. Bentley sees herself and Philip as frustrated artists; she has a passion for music and, in her youth, entertained dreams of success as a pianist, and he spends much of his time sketching and painting.

Assuming that they are moving to a mid-sized prairie city in the middle of the Great Depression, Mrs. Bentley's dream of establishing a second-hand bookstore there as a means of escape from their unappealing life in a small town is patently absurd.

At the top stratum of society there are well-off middle-class families of British origin and Protestant belief that operate their own businesses in town.

In between there are foreign-born settlers like Mr. and Mrs. Sven Ellingson, the Norwegian neighbours of the Bentleys, or country-bred people like Paul Kirby and Judith West, who have come to town for work.

Although the novel experienced poor initial sales in 1941, its courted ambiguity and classically unreliable narrator make it an object for boundless speculation and argument.

It is a study of the failed artistic imagination, and of an eroding puritanism; it is also ... a good example of Frye's concept of the garrison mentality, in its exploration of the peculiarities of the Canadian experience of nature and its relation to civilization.