In the early twentieth century, Terrell Jackson, a married man in the small town of Fremond, Texas, accidentally encounters Hannah, a young woman with no family. Raised by a kindly stranger, Hannah seeks solace and community in the local church. When she meets and falls in love with Terrell, they defy the town's mores and he divorces his wife, marries Hannah, and takes her to live on a ranch. When the church expels Hannah Jackson for her transgression, the couple descend into a harrowing struggle that slowly twists the marriage apart. The sins of the father and mother inexorably encroach on the lives of their children, and the results are tragic. Told from multiple points of view by the townspeople after Hannah's death, this small town epic explores the tensions and suffocating repressions that pervaded American life during the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, and that particularly egulated the lives of women.