'A part of me will always live at Salt Creek though it is on the far side of the world...'The comfortable and respectable life Hester Finch now leads in Chichester, England, could not be further from the hardship her family endured on leaving Adelaide for Salt Creek in 1855. Yet she finds her thoughts drawn back to that remote, beautiful and inhospitable outcrop of South Australia and the connections she and her siblings forged there, far from the city society in which they had been raised: encounters with the few travellers passing along the nearby stock route and the local indigenous people - in particular a boy, Tully, whom Hester's father seeks to educate almost as his own son - would change the fates of the Finches forever; nor would life ever be the same again for those who had long called the area home.