Thirty-six-year-old David Whitstone, former Federal Revenue Agent in Memphis, now a farmer in pre-electrified rural Mississippi, where he has managed to light up his house against the odds, finds himself in a position he may have desired for some time, and been a party in creating its necessity - that of savior to his isolated neighbor, twenty-one-year-old Glory Holding, who as a girl secretly thought of him as a shining knight in a magic electric house. Now she and her two-year-old son and baby daughter have been abandoned by her husband, Henry, during dangerous flooding. It's November, 1941, and sweeping changes are on the horizon from TVA for their power-less community, with war against Germany looming. When Henry returns after escaping jail for a crime against a naturalized German citizen, passion, mistrust and betrayals consume David, Glory, and Henry. But the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the resulting declaration of war gives each of them one chance for redemption.