Faced with the tragic loss of his mother, Ben Elliot is forced into a move he hates. He has had to give up his home and friends in the city to move with his father and younger brother to the tiny village of Ship Cove on Newfoundland's isolated northern peninsula.
The only thing that makes the place bearable is its nearness to the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, where he finds comfort in the ancient myths and sagas his mother loved. He also revives his childhood game of imagining he is Tor, a young Viking shipbuilder. But when the Tor game becomes increasingly real and harder to control, Ben discovers that the lines between past and present, fantasy and reality, are beginning to blur - with dangerous consequences.