This sweeping, richly imagined novel charts the rapid transformation of Southern California from frontier to suburb during the first half of the twentieth century. At the story's center is Linda Stamp, a fisher girl born in 1903 on a coastal farm in San Diego's North County, and the three men who upend her life and vie for her affection: her pragmatic farming brother, Edmund; Captain Willis Poore, a Pasadena rancher with a heroic military past; and Bruder, the mysterious young man Linda's father brings home from World War I. Through the darkly handsome Bruder, Linda glimpses love and a world beyond her own. She follows him to the seemingly greener pastures of Pasadena, where he is the foreman of a flourishing orange ranch, the homestead and inheritance of the charming bachelor Willis Poore.