When Ethan Postlethwaite, his wife Grace and their daughter Amy announce that they will be leaving the family home in the Yorkshire Dales, Grace's parents are heartbroken. Ethan has always struggled to fit into the family and now they feel he is stealing their daughter away. Hoping for a new life prospecting for gold in the wilds of Canada, the young family say goodbye and set sail across the Atlantic in search of a brighter future.

The journey there proves hard and treacherous, however, and upon arrival it becomes apparent that the riches they had been promised in the gold fields have already been plundered. So when the family is devastated by the death of Grace, Ethan decides he must take his daughter back to England.

Arriving in Liverpool, Ethan and Amy soon find work in a dairy as cow-keepers, but Amy is restless and struggles to settle into yet another new life. And when a chance encounter at a cattle show ignites an old friendship, she must decide where her own future lies and what she must do in order to find happiness at last . . .