From a writer The Globe and Mail described as "Leonard Cohen's spiritual daughter."

When a brutal explosion in a cottage town in Vermont brings together Amos, a disfigured handyman, and Aubrey, the cosseted son of a wealthy New England family, neither has any idea that this event will shape them forever. As their lives touch again over the years, these unlikely friends forge a bond that survives war and peace, love and loss.

Dennison Smith seamlessly weaves together the lives of the silent Amos and the motherless Aubrey-from '30s Vermont, where Aubrey photographs a naked Greta Garbo as she swims in an icy lake; to Princeton, where Albert Einstein is a friend and neighbour; to pre-revolutionary Havana and the remote oil fields of Alberta-before they meet again in the Italian Alps in the last days of the Second World War. There, one man will save the life of the other and transform his own; and with the young Inuit woman, Kona, he will start a new life.

Blending the personal with the historical, this is a remarkable coming-of-age story in which "life in all its passions, prejudices and precariousness overflows from every page" (Henry Sutton).

DENNISON SMITH is a poet, playwright and novelist, as well as an actor and director. Her work has been performed and published in England, Ireland, Canada and the United States. Her first novel, Scavenger, was also presented in play form as Desert Story. She is the author of two books of poetry, Anon Necessity and Fermata. Originally from Chicago and Vermont, Dennison Smith is now a Canadian citizen who splits her time between a small island in British Columbia and Norwich, England, where she is pursuing her PhD and teaching creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

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