I stumbled upon this book while pursuing something else. That's how I find most good things. I was listening to an Irish radio station interview actor David Tennant a few weeks ago, and Elliot Perlman was promoting this book on the same show. I hadn't intended to listen longer, but when I did, I went to the library web site and put a hold on the book. "Dickensian" was the word that sprang to mind as I was reading it and I notice the word has been used in other reviews. Don't let me mislead you. This book is very much about the present and the past seventy years. It touches on the civil rights struggle in the United States and goes into great detail about how the killing machine that was Auschwitz worked. What does the civil rights movement have to do with the Holocaust? Well, Elliot Perlman has the gift for weaving seemingly disparate events and people together. That's how he resembles Dickens, although Dickens, even in his most passionate flights of horrific description, could not have come up with the details of how a gas chamber works. I found those passages difficult to read even though there was nothing described I hadn't encountered before. If you're new to what happened in the death camps, you're in for a shock. This book is cleverly woven together, moving back and forth in time, and in and out of story threads. For me, there was only one coincidence that jarred, but I'll spare you. It's a small one. I'll be placing holds on more Elliot Perlman books.

"A superb multistrand epic that stretches across continents and over a century of history as it depicts racial prejudice and its consequences." Sarah Johnson Globe & Mail