Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

In the late 1930s, Harry Saville, his wife Ellen and his one-year-old son andrew, arrive at their new home just outside the town of Saxton in the lower Yorkshire Hills of England. Harry's enthusiasm for his new home, an old farm laborer's cottage that smells of wet dogs and cat urine, is not shared by his wife. Ellen is disgusted by the look of the place; it's dirty, has ripped plaster and floorboards and is exceedingly small. There are places on some of the doors where the former owner's dog scratched the wood all the way through so that daylight comes through. Likewise, the former owner used holes in the kitchen floorboards as a garbage refuse.

Harry Saville appears to be the type of man who makes the best out of every situation; his wife is not. Ellen comes from a...