Labour Day, 1955. Near a creek in Port Arthur, Ontario, a man’s body hangs at the end of a rope. The story of the body, and its missing shoe, begins in Finland, decades earlier and an ocean away. In January, 1918, civil war breaks out in Finland. Jussi Mantere and his friends, the Solbakken brothers—Anders, Karl, and Ivor, known as Rabbit—as well as Karl’s wife, Viktoria, are swept into the fighting. The war rages for months and the country is laid waste. When peace is declared, the price of mending the fractured country is silence: to heal and forget, both victor and vanquished, White and Red, are asked to not speak of the war. In the ensuing years, Jussi and other survivors immigrate to Canada, bringing their silence with them. In Port Arthur’s summer of 1955, events set in motion in 1918 come to haunt Jussi’s family. A stranger—or is it someone Jussi knows?—threatens the peace and safety of his family. Jussi must decide whether and how to break his silence about the past and its horrors, and spare his grandson the bitter burden of generations-old resentments. Spanning nearly 50 years, this novel shows how a few months of fighting in the 1918 Finnish Civil War can still influence a family in Port Arthur, Ontario in 1955.
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