Here, life appears to claim them and pin them down, quickly, irreversibly: marriages are made, frequently without any obvious intentionality, names change, children are born, houses are populated. Mina and Jossel have their hearts set on America, but get no further than the shores of Merseyside and, specifically, the suburbs of Brownlow Hill and Allerton. Like all good stories, it teems with false starts, mysterious clues and dead ends its propulsiveness is the more potent because of the times the engine of the story appears to stall. Grant’s gift is for the arresting scene that blends menace with comedy 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. A grain merchant’s family uproot themselves from their life in Riga and are scattered.
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