Mesmerizing storytelling, great themes embodied and hidden in the workings of realistic relationships and lives, precise language and a strong whiff of the uncanny -- a magnificent novel. * A moving and memorable epic tale that spans decades and continents to bring us the riches of one family's history of intertwined lives. * In the farming country of Winnipeg, two brothers grow up and apart in the 1930s, gravitating towards a parent each as mother and father themselves find a changing climate in world affairs reaching out to their rural backwater and prising them asunder...* Exhaustion is crippling FIka at the icecap; it's midwinter 1960, and she's lost her companions to a frosty death, can barely carry her lifeblood, and must still ski for a month yet to reach civilization on the other side of the North Pole. Will she survive? Where will she find the will? * Quite how these two gripping tales on their separate sides of the globe unfold and come together as mesmerizingly as they do is the beauty and the accomplishment of this magical epic.