THE BORDER OF ASH

Eighty years later, the names wrote back.October 1944. Dr. Aurélie Holder crossed an ocean to prove that a mixed-race woman from Cape Breton could be the best doctor in any room. Now the Krasnovian regime has taken her passport, stamped a number on her file, and put her aboard a deportation train. The Resettlement Office records its prisoners by number only. So Aurélie starts keeping a secret record of her own, pencilling each true name into the margins of the Ministry's ledger, while her stray shepherd-cross, Tinder, carries messages through the dark for someone who claims he can help.That someone may be Anton Veres, the Ministry translator she watched strike an old man on the station platform. Aurélie was certain what kind of man he was. She was completely wrong.Winnipeg, 2026. Historian Naomi Okafor-Ellis prides herself on keeping her distance from the dead: she counts them, she does not feel them. Then she buys a locked tin box at an estate sale and inherits an elderly dog with it. The first time she touches the green ledger inside, she smells coal smoke and feels a child's cold hand close around hers. She can't explain the echoes. Neither can Daniel Veres, the sceptical journalist whose family has spent eighty years living down the word "e;collaborator."e; But a powerful local philanthropist wants the ledger badly, and he is prepared to offer Naomi everything she has ever wanted to make it disappear.Two women, two love stories and one old book of names. The past is not finished speaking, and the only way to answer it is out loud.For readers who love sweeping dual-timeline WWII fiction, slow-burn forbidden romance, and a dog they will never forget.