Robin Jenkins' novel tells a contemporary but universal story which resounds with a sense of hope. An elderly man, Willie, and his wife, Maggie, travel to a Navajo reservation in the Arizona desert where Maggie's missionary sister, Elspeth, lies dying of cancer. An article on the couple in a Glasgow newspaper a few weeks previously had sparked off a great effort in the city to raise funds for the trip and Willie and his wife soon find themselves the target of unseemly publicity and envied by their neighbours. On their arrival in America, Willie finds his lifelong beliefs tested under the huge, empty sky of Arizona, and Maggie, it seems, has undergone a real transformation...