One spring day in 1992, when William was halfway between his eighth and ninth birthdays, he looked out from the back verandah and saw, huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Dirty black and streaked with gray, it rolled and boiled as it climbed into the clear blue sky...but there was no sound, no rumble of an explosion...His father, dead by fire and his mother plagued by demons on her own, William is cast upon the charity of an unknown uncle, John McIvor - an embittered old man camped in the ruins of a once great station and homestead. It's a baffling and sinister new world for William, a place of decay and secrets. His uncle is obsessed by a long life of decline and a dark quest for revival, his mother is desperate for a wealth and security she has never known and all their hopes seem to rest on young William's shoulders. But as the past and the present of Kuran Station unravel and merge together, the price of that inheritance may prove to be the downfall of them all...