‘Did anyone ever begin to be a poet at thirty-six in the shade?’ Edward Thomas asked. This novel traces how, after a lifetime of prose, mostly written in the shade of angry despair, he did. Utterly unexpected changes follow, more than his faithful wife Helen would wish. She tells her story of watchful devotion and, she hopes, influence, often threatened by their powerful friend, Robert Frost. Beginning in the iconic summer of 1914 in a rural world full of rich promise and beauty, it is a story of friendships, marriage, tranquillity and war. The complexity and depth of Thomas’ poetry emerges through his wrestling with words along with home, children, sowing, harvesting and the perpetual lack of money. It is the story of decisions, change and consequences, in a rural setting where what endures is the natural world and its inhabitants, those lives of which, as we now realize, we are simply one part.