After a bizarre accident leaves him with amnesia, a young man, Roddy Greenbank, searches for his past and the meaning of his life and strange destiny, in a story of love, hate, and bitterness set in nineteenth-century Northumberland.

Barbara was beautiful and totally deaf and totally unaware of her High Banks Hall heritage and the scandal that would one day touch her life.--

Annie, the illegitimate daughter of Kate Hannigan, battles her way out of the slums of turn-of-the-century England and into the arms of a loving doctor and a poor Oxford-educated man who lives down the road.