Award-winning writer Dennis Bock returns with an unforgettable novel about a man whose life has touched millions. In The Communist’s Daughter, the legendary Canadian doctor Norman Bethunevisionary, radical, martyrcomes vividly to life. Amidst the death and chaos of the Japanese army’s advance into the northern hills of China, Bethune composes a wrenching letter to his daughter, a small child he has never seen. Her mother, the mysterious Swede named Kajsa he abandoned in war-torn Spain, haunts him. Now, faced with imminent death, the only trained doctor in 100,000 square miles, Bethune must confront the sum of his life.
Set against the tumult of the late 1930s, when ideologies clashed in Spain and China and the world stood poised for global conflict, The Communist’s Daughter is a remarkable depiction of the moral ambiguities of war, political idealism and personal responsibility. Bock’s Bethune is a man of fierce conviction and intense, often unreasoning, loyalty; yet, in the end, will he summon the courage to confess to his daughter the true reason he left her to come to the heart of this life-and-death struggle in the hills of China?
 This is storytelling at its bestan elegant, passionate novel that unfolds against the sweep of history as the world, once again, turns towards war.

The Communist's Daughter

Literature & Fiction

BOCK, Dennis

Contemporary

Phyllis Bruce Books

The Ash Garden

Author's highly praised first novel. True first edition.

World Literature

HarperCollins Canada, Limited

Drawing on imaginary outtakes from Riefenstahl's infamousfilm of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Dennis Bock weaves together the lives ofa family living in the shadow of history.
Olympia is the story of post-war German immigrants, as told by theirson Peter, born in the New World and raised in the sixties and seventies.
Though great figures and events of mid-century touch the lives of thisremarkable family, it is the private histories, the grand failings and smalltriumphs of Peter's family that remain etched in the reader's imagination. FromRuby's struggle to rise above her leukemia and her father's love of severeweather and killing tornadoes, to the saint who witnesses a miracle at thebottom of a drowned Spanish village.
Set against the backdrop of some of the most significant Olympic moments ofour times--the Nazis' stylish and sinister glorification of the Berlin Olympicsand the 1972 Munich hostage--taking in which 11 Israelis were murdered--Olympiaoffers a bold and refreshing perspective on the tragic relationship betweenGermans and Jews in this century.
Bock writes with insight and clarity in a breath-taking, beautiful prose thatsignals the debut of a brilliant new talent.

Olympia

Literary

Phyllis Bruce Books Perennial

Dennis Bock’s novel The Communist’s Daughter met with praise from readers and reviewers the moment it reached bookstore shelves, debuting as an instant Maclean’s bestseller. This is the story of legendary Canadian doctor Norman Bethune―visionary, radical, martyr. Amidst the death and chaos of the Japanese army’s advance into the hills of northern China, Bethune composes a wrenching letter to his daughter, a small child he has never seen, the daughter of a woman abandoned in war-torn Spain. 
Set against the tumult of the late 1930s, The Communist’s Daughter is a remarkable depiction of the moral ambiguities of war, political idealism and personal responsibility, an elegant, passionate novel that unfolds against the sweep of history.

British & Irish

• Winner of the Japan-Canada Award• A Globe100 Best Book of 2001
• Finalist for the 2003 IMPACAward; the Amazon.com/Booksin Canada FirstNovel Award; the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize;and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prizefor Best Book (Caribbean and Canada Region)Reissued to mark the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, The AshGarden is a searing novel of three lives shattered by war, from a writer TheGlobe and Mail called "Canada’s next great novelist."

Ash Garden

A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America . . . A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria . . . A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon . . . Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning—their pasts blurred and their destinies at once defined and distorted by an inconceivable event. For that man was bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero and that plane the Enola Gay. In August of 1945, in a blinding flash, Hiroshima sees the dawning of the modern age. With these three people, Dennis Bock transforms a familiar story—the atom bomb as a means to end worldwide slaughter—into something witnessed, as if for the first time, in all its beautiful and terrible power. Destroyer of Worlds. With Anton and Sophie and Emiko, with the complete arc of their histories and hopes, convictions and regrets, The Ash Garden is intricate yet far-reaching: from market streets in Japan to German universities, from New York tenements to, ultimately, a peaceful village in Ontario. Revealed here, as their fates triangulate, are the true costs and implications of a nightmare that has persisted for more than half a century. In its reserves of passion and wisdom, in its grasp of pain and memory, in its balance of ambition and humanity, this first novel is an astonishing triumph.

The Ash Garden: A Novel

United States

KNOPF

Emiko Amai is six years old in August 1945 when the Hiroshima bomb burns away half of her face. To Anton, a young German physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, that same bomb represents the pinnacle of scientific elegance. And for his Austrian wife Sophie, a Jewish refugee, it marks the start of an irreparable fissure in their new marriage. Fifty years later, seemingly far removed from the day that defined their lives, Emiko visits Anton and Sophie, and in Dennis Bock’s powerfully imagined narrative, their histories converge.

Vintage

Doubleday, Canada

This is an exploration of family ties. Through Peter's eyes we are told the story of his family, from the Bavarian war-damaged uncles who are trapped in the past to the Olympians striving to evolve into something new for the future.

Bloomsbury, London

This is a story of evolution, love and death which centres on three generations of Olympic athletes - the Bavarian grandparents who escaped Nazi Germany, and their Canadian descendents.

BLOOMSBURY

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BOCK, Dennis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BOCK, Dennis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BOCK, Dennis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Communist's Daughter

The Ash Garden

Olympia

The Communist's Daughter

Ash Garden

The Ash Garden: A Novel

The Ash Garden

Olympia

Olympia

Olympia