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Cowards recounts the collapse of the painstakingly constructed life of a family in a society split between formal European and Saskatchewan-style pragmatic socialism. Lora and Léon Chaulieu, the former a respected judge and the latter a blacklisted writer, manage to keep their family on the right side of the law and the prospects of their two teenage daughters open until Lora is reassigned from the capital, where the family lives, to a small prairie city. This forces Léon to become the central parental figure, making it impossible to keep up the wall between his subversive activities and his home life. Without the balancing influence of Lora, the turmoil caused by the meeting of these two worlds leads the whole family down a path of increasing lawlessness.

A familys life falls into turmoil when the parents timid political dissidence is discovered by their far more enterprising children.