by Nancy Huston
First published 2002
Paula discovers the scattered remains of her grandfather Paddon's journal and becomes consumed with reconstructing his life story. Through these fragments, she uncovers the history of four generations in the prairie town of Anton, beginning with brothers John and Jake Sterling in the late 1800s. Paddon, John's son, dreams of becoming a philosopher and writing a great work about time itself. But life pulls him in different directions. He marries a practical woman who cannot share his intellectual ambitions. Children arrive one after another. Bills pile up. His mercurial nature works against him. The years pass through frontier hardships, the Great War, the Depression, and the prosperous 1950s, while Paddon's philosophical dreams slip further away. As Paula reconstructs his story, she grapples with a central question: can telling the story of someone who saw himself as a failure become a form of salvation? Her obsessive journey becomes an exploration of family bonds and the power of imagination to redeem the past.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-saga, redemption, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Anton, Prairie Town
Period: Late 1800s, Great War, Great Depression, 1950s
224 pages · Paperback · Steerforth Press