The Same Stones

Elizabeth Fraser came to Canada from Edinburgh in 1944 and never went back. She raised two daughters, arranged the flowers at the United Church, made the leek soup, and kept, for sixty years, an absolute silence about everything that had come before. Her daughters did not know her parents' names. They did not know she had worked in a munitions factory during the war. They did not know she had a brother. When dementia begins to loosen the grip on what Elizabeth has always held closed, her daughter Catherine starts to listen differently. And when Elizabeth says one clear sentence about a woman named Agnes who sang in the factory — says it and then retreats back into the fog — Catherine understands that she is not going to be able to leave this alone. The Same Stones is the story of the journey Catherine makes to Edinburgh with her husband David — through archives and reading rooms and the stone streets of a city that remembers everything — and of what she finds there. It is a story about what silence costs the people who keep it, and what it costs the people who love them. And it is a story about the courage required to go looking for the truth of someone else's life and to bring it back, whole, to the person it belongs to.