A Far Away Place, Bear River

A Far Away Place, Bear River (Mary Marvin McLeod, 1920-2003) is the story of Maple Grove farm, the first volume of a panoramic Canadian trilogy that takes us from a farming community in the 1920s, to a small town during the Depression, to Ottawa and Montreal during the war years. More than a memoir, it is a history of the times, stitching together a series of tales and vignettes about the people and places Mary sees along the way. Underlying it all is an eldest daughter's recounting of her parents' tragic fate as Mary finds herself following a similar path, tangled in "the strange mathematics of give and take."

Bear River, Volume 1: After suffering head wounds in WWI, Daniel Marvin, a career naval officer from Newport News, Virginia, brings his bride, Mary MacGregor of Helensburgh, Scotland, to a lonely, long-deserted farm near Bear River, Nova Scotia, a village he visited once as a boy. His wounds soon force him into a military hospital in Montreal, where he supports the farm by making brass work and selling it in Canada's best jewellery stores. Mary MacGregor is an unusually gifted singer, but Maple Grove farm is the stage on which her stars have plunged her, and she is too often alone running the farm and raising a family that will grow to ten.

"Why did they persist in this struggle, for what dream? The vagaries of nature alone would destroy the dreams of rugged individuals, never mind sensitive artists with sensitive health. The farm was a death wish and they seemed not to know it."