World War II is over and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to Almond Tree. He’s seen his fair share of horror as a stretcher-bearer, and now he just wants to build houses and to marry Beth Hardy, his neighbor’s daughter. But Beth has other plans. An ardent socialist, she is convinced the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She is devoted to her cause, and she doesn’t believe in marriage. Her ideals will exact a ruinously high price. But Wes will not stop loving her. is story of Wes and Beth, and their journey through the catastrophic mid-twentieth century—from summer in Almond Tree to Moscow’s bitter winter and back again—to find a way of being together.