Letters Across the Sea

Reviewed by Nancy Falconer

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In her latest novel, Canadian best-selling historical fiction author Genevieve Graham once again touches the heart in an emotionally compelling journey through love, loss, and redemption, spanning a period of Canada’s history from the Depression to the end of WW II.

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Known for “breathing life back into history, one story at a time” ~ more especially Canadian history ~ Graham has wrapped her cast of memorable characters in a viscerally-moving tale triggered by real events in our nation’s history.

As the saying goes, God is in the detail, and the author has done her historical research par excellence, no tidbit too small to help us breathe in the ambience of the period. (Who knew that heavy curtains were drawn across all Eatons' store windows at closing time on Saturdays in order to circumvent passersby from the unmentionable sin of coveting merchandise on the Sabbath?)

Letters Across the Sea immerses the reader in the deprivation, unrest and anger of the Depression years and in the very real emotional complexities of war-time sacrifices and service, as experienced through the characters’ eyes and hearts. History class was never like this!

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The fictional story line is centred on a star-crossed love, doomed by anti-semitism rampant in Canada during the Depression (historic fact). In the aftermath of a community baseball final one June night in 1933, the main characters are caught up in what came to be known as the Christie Pits Riot (a true event), the largest ethnic riot in our nation’s history.

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As the story moves into the outbreak of WW II, Canada’s little-known, ill-fated role in the Battle of Hong Kong (also historic fact) takes front and centre as the historical focus and the unimaginable suffering of the characters is both gut-wrenching and heart-breaking. Doomed from the start, in reality those few Canadian soldiers who managed somehow to survive the brutally inhumane treatment in the Japanese imprisonment camps returned home with untold scars and foreshortened lives, hauntingly mirrored in one of the novel’s main characters.

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The author has poignantly dedicated Letters Across the Sea in part to the “..brave men of Canada’s Royal Rifles and Winnipeg Grenadiers, who never should have been sent to Hong Kong. The history books seem to have mostly forgotten them, but I never will.”

If your reading genre is historical fiction, treat yourself to a Genevieve Graham novel and be transported back in time by what has been described as her “delectable combination of romance, intrigue, and history”. And if our Canadian school history curriculum left you snoozing, I bet Graham will have you saying ‘I had no idea!’.