Strangers and Sojourners: A Novel (Children of the Last Days/Michael D. O'Brien)

Strangers and Sojourners is an epic novel set in the rugged interior of British Columbia, the first volume of a trilogy which traces the lives of four generations of a family of exiles. Beginning on the first day of the year 1900, and concluding with the climactic events of the final days leading up to the Millennium, the series follows Anne and Stephen Delaney and their descendants as they live through the tumultuous events of this century.Anne, the central character, is a highly educated, cultured Englishwoman who leaves Europe for the Canadian frontier after serving as a battlefield nurse during the First World War. Raised in a family of spiritualists and Fabian socialists, she has fled civilization in search of a new world. She embarks on an experimental year of teaching school to a cabin full of "bush-children" - a temporary sojourn in an untamed land. There she meets a trapper-homesteader, an Irish immigrant who is fleeing the "troubles" in his own violent past. This is a story about the gradual movement of souls from despair and unbelief to faith, hope, and love, about the psychology of perception, and about the ultimate questions of life, death and the mystery of being.