Author(s): Linda Grant

Fiction

It's 1913 and a young reckless girl goes out into the forest on the edge of the Baltic sea and meets a gang of rowdy young men with revolution on their minds. It sounds like a fairy tale but it's not the supernatural - the adventure leads to flight, emigration, and the story of a migrant family adapting to a new land, a new language and the pursuit of idealism or happiness. But what is owed to those left behind, trapped in the old lands?

From the flour mills of Latvia to Liverpool suburbia to post-war Soho, The Story of the Forest follows the lives of those trying to make sense of themselves in a new world, haunted by the memory of what might have been.