Dear Mother and Father, After all those years, I was certain Jakob Hirsch had forgotten me. Then came his proposal of marriage. With more impulse than wisdom, I crossed the ocean to begin a new life with him in Shadow Creek, Idaho. Little did I dream of the changes eleven years had brought to the man I once loved - which included three small children waiting with him at the station. I will not marry a stranger who no longer loves me, but I have agreed...

In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of two families--the farming Pye family, and zoologist Kate Morrison and her three brothers--are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy. Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch perfect, you know from the opening page that this is the real thing-a literary experience in which to lose yourself, by an...