At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.
The mountain-village passions of a German widow and her sons unfold in the style of a 1920s movie.
On a secluded prairie farm, adolescent boys labor in wheat fields for a sexually predatory warden and his farmhands, who threaten to feed them to a voracious beast if they ever disobey. The newly arrived Linus instantly catches the warden's eye, and begins to receive secret visitations from a mysterious girl. The other boys tell Linus the legend of a special boy who fled the farm and became a glorious angel that will one day return to free them all. When Linus asks the girl if she is the angel, her answer is enigmatic. After the warden's favorite boy dies, Linus is poised to become the next victim. The girl reappears and promises to help him escape, but with hope comes punishment.
Doubting details of her mother’s deathbed story, a skeptical daughter drags her brother on a genealogical goose chase through the Canadian prairies to the remote Icelandic highland. Determined to prove her mother spun tall tales, Erika delves into a basement full of file boxes only to find that family history triggers her own obsessive curiosity. Holed up with stacks of diaries, letters and pictures, Erika becomes spellbound by her increasing sense of belonging to an unfolding story.
