A first-person narrative of Lilly Bere's life, On Canaan's Side opens as the eighty-five-year-old Irish emigre mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. Lilly, the daughter of a Dublin policeman, revisits her eventful past, going back to the moment she was forced to flee Ireland at the end of the First World War. She continues her tale in America, where - far from her family - she first tastes the sweetness of love and the bitterness of betrayal.