Ned Vatcher, only 14, walks home from school in the winter of 1936 to find the house locked, the family car missing, and his parents gone without a trace. Ned soon finds himself enmeshed in his missing father' family and the poverty his father had escaped. Two other people loom large as Ned becomes Newfoundland's first media mogul, building an empire to insulate him from loss: a Jesuit priest named Father Duggan, and Sheilagh Fielding, a boozy giantess who wanders the city streets at night, composing satiric columns that scandalize the rich and powerful. In Ned, Fielding sees a surrogate for her two lost children, the secret that dogs her life, while Ned believes the enigmatic Fielding to be his soulmate.