A grain merchant’s family uproot themselves from their life in Riga and are scattered. Like seeds on the wind, some will make it to fertile ground and others will find themselves in inhospitable terrain, or buffeted here and there by unpredictable currents, some destructive, some surprisingly helpful. Linda Grant’s ninth novel continues her exploration of how chance, contingency and unintended consequences intersect with history’s larger movements; how personal narratives are shaped not merely by what we think of as inescapable forces and events, but by moments of randomness and whimsy. Her characters are, as ever, mobile not only in a geographical sense, but in the way that their desires and motivations shift and adapt, influenced by memories of the past and intimations of the future.
What lies beneath the journey of members of the Mendel family from Latvia to Liverpool over a century ago is unclear or, at least, determined by multiple overlapping factors. A young girl, Mina, has wandered into the forest, basket in hand, in search of mushrooms; what she has discovered is a group of young men, aspiring Bolsheviks, full of anti-tsarist fury and a passion for change. The suspicion that something traumatic, violent, possibly sexual, has befallen her passes immediately into the realm of folk tale, and it may indeed be that nothing at all has happened beyond the creation of a catalyst – both for Mina’s brother Jossel, who grasps the opportunity to sketch out a plan for emigration and resettlement, and for Grant, who can transform an obscure origin story into a lively, many-stranded generational saga.
