When 10-year-old Jess’s Dad loses his business, her family is forced to leave the comfortable life they had in Nottingham to live in an old cottage in the remote village of Fens End.

As her father becomes more and more withdrawn, and her mother increasingly worried and withdrawn, Jess has to fend for herself on her first simmer in this strange, remote place.

But when Jess meets Old Tom, and befriends Mike the Storyteller, the stories the two men share slowly begin to reveal the harsh history and mysterious beauty of the Fens, making Jess realise that perhaps, far from being the end of the world, Fens End is the beginning of a new one.