In the summer of 1990, Charles Gaines and his wife bought 160 acres of wild land on the northeast coast of Nova Scotia. They began to see the land as a home that might heal their recently battered thirty-year marriage; and as an opportunity to take on a big, risky project instead of settling into the caution and gradual losses of middle-class middle age. Enlisting their children, they decide to build a cabin on the land with their own hands. A Family Place is a transfiguring tale of personal and familial regeneration.