Wounded during WW1 and after briefly serving as a policeman in Ireland, Charles' grandfather Alexander "Jack" Ambrose leaves his new wife and baby son in Colchester intent on starting a new life farming on the Canadian prairies, only to return to his family empty-handed four years later. Why did he leave, what did he attempt to do, what happened, and why did he return?A century later his grandson Charles attempts to understand and connect to a man he had met only briefly, trying to reconstruct those "lost" years by writing a fictionalised account of this period in his grandfather's life.