Henry's love of rural life is not shared by his city-bred wife, Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm and become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale