The Story of the Forest

The engrossing latest from Grant (A Stranger City) revolves around a fateful chance encounter in the Latvian woods. Mina Mendel, 14, is foraging for mushrooms on the eve of WWI when she stumbles upon a band of Bolsheviks. Back home, she rhapsodizes to her older brother Jossel about the soldiers’ dancing and singing, prompting Jossel to worry she’ll spoil her virtue. She sneaks back to the Bolsheviks and kisses one of them before Jossel arranges to take her overseas for a better life in the U.S., leaving behind their parents and three other siblings. In England, she and Jossel are waylaid by the war, and they settle in Brownlow Hill, where Mina marries Louis, a soldier. The novel’s second section, set shortly after WWII, follows Mina and Louis’s daughter, Paula, who works at a London film studio and whose boss is captivated by Mina’s story of the Bolsheviks in the forest and plans to make a movie about her life. Grant’s omniscient narration turns over dark corners of the story (the reader learns the boy soldier Mina kissed was killed and eaten by wolves), and she cleverly injects commentary on the family’s trajectory as the narrative unfolds. Readers are in for a treat. Agent: Gráinne Fox, UTA. (Nov.)