Hester Finch's comfortable life 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 to that beautiful, inhospitable outcrop of South Australia and the connections she and her siblings forged there: encounters with passing travellers 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, and of the area's first people, for ever.