Harold Hoefle has published both fiction and non-fiction in literary journals all over the country. This new novel traces the life of Walter Schwende, a Scarborough boy who seeks out his past in travel. He lives with Czech refugees in a Vancouver rooming-house, then works in a northern mining town, later settling on a Nicaraguan coffee farm. He ends up as a college teacher in Montreal, where he tries to imagine what life in his family’s native home of Austria might have been like. This becomes an obsession that finally takes him back to Europe.