First published 1999
Nate Bone collapses and dies on a Winnipeg football field in 1960 as his family watches in horror. At that same moment, thousands of miles away in Siberia, a young woman known only as Fika begins a desperate journey to escape the Soviet Union across the frozen tundra. Albrecht Storr, now an adult, tries to understand how these two events connect. He remembers 1935, when he and his twin brother Gerhard were children with Nate. That year, Nate still grieved his dead sister when he made a choice that changed everything. He kidnapped an infant girl. The crime went undetected for years, but its consequences spread through multiple lives. Albrecht pieces together how that single reckless act by a damaged boy created a chain of events that would eventually drive Fika across the brutal Siberian wilderness twenty-five years later. The stolen child becomes the key that links a death in Canada to a woman's fight for freedom in Russia.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Canada, Russia, Siberia, Winnipeg
Period: 1935, 1960, 1960s, 1980s
304 pages · Paperback · Flamingo
Content warnings: child-death, kidnapping