Treading water

In Treading water, the voices of the residents of Bear Creek surface. Gus Sanders, a young trapper, arrives to seek his fortune on 1904 but loses his heart, and then his life; Jake Schroeder must choose between his desire to join up and his Mennonite pacifist roots; Isobel Grey, suffragette, leaves the movement in Winnipeg and brings her politics with her; Dutch war bride Aliesje Milner, six months pregnant, waits at the train station for a husband whose face she can no longer remember; and young Paul Doyle's summer job demolishing houses to make way for the new hydroelectric dam teaches him more than he bargained for. The indomitable personality of Ursula Hartmann, first child born in Bear Creek and among the last to leave, threads through the novel as they trace a community from its innocent beginnings until the day the waters rise.