Those Are Pearls

The first time Harry Short rides into battle--in 1895, at the beginning of the Boer War--it's to win the heart of Margaret Roll. Nineteen years later, at the start of World War One, he enlists again, this time to escape her. With Margaret, Harry creates a family rich in character whose story spans generations and continents, traveling from Cape Town to Winnipeg to Flanders' Fields. Harry's family arrives to Canada in 1910 as prairie homesteaders, witnesses the Winnipeg Riot of 1919, survives the Great Flood of 1950. They marry farmers, bootleggers, and communists, are investigated by the police, perform acts of battlefield heroism, are torpedoed. From the seeds of an impoverished boilermaker's adoration for a rich doctor's daughter grows a sweeping story of a family whose personal passions are woven into the tapestry of world history.