"Mary Miller is an outcast. As a girl she had plunged into the hot burn - a torrent of chemical run-off from the local mine. Fished out, half-dead, any sympathy for her disappeared when the boy who pushed her in died in a mining accident two weeks later. From then on, she was regarded with suspicion by her God-fearing community. Years later, now a mother, Mary is caught up in a faltering affair with a schoolteacher. Meanwhile Sandy, her bastard son, has fallen in love with a homeless girl. Both mother and son must come to terms with the past, in the knowledge that their small dramas are being played out against a much larger canvas - one of fire and of the flood. "--Publisher description.