Set in Charlottetown and Ottawa, in the period demarcated by the Charlottetown Conference and Confederation Day (1864-1867), Of First Love in a Dream of Countrymen is a love story, a historical novel, and a Bildungsroman, it is, however, neither a syrupy tearjerker, nor a nationalistic mapping of the events leading to Confederation.
One might say about Of First Love in a Dream of Countrymen that it transcends both national borders and strict novelistic genres. Justin Sand, the main character of the novel, is one of those energetic young men who directly contributed, through their unswerving dedication, to the advent of Canadian Confederation, but he is disregarded by the older generation, whose representatives do not support the idea of a sovereign Canada, among them the parents of his fiancée, Romana, and Samuel Lang, a retired businessman who amassed his fortune by nefarious means.