Sweeter than All the World /
Rudy Wiebe.
- Toronto : Vintage Canada, 2002.
- 438 p. : cov. ill. ; 21 cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
CONTENTS 1. Speaking Waskahikan 2. Sailing to Danzig 3. Flour and Yeast 4. On Lastfire Lake 5. Tongue Screw 6. Manhattan 7. Believing Is Seeing 8. Left-handed Woman 9. Table Setting 10. Crossing the Volga 11. Sleeping with Franz Kafka 12. The Holy Community of the Bride 13. Except God Who Already Knows 14. A Plan for Jews and Mennonites 15. The Shells of the Ocean 16. A Tour of Siberia 17. In the Ear of the Beholder 18. My Brother Vanya 19. Birch and Lilac 20. The Hills of Number Eight Romanovka 21. Bones of the Atacama Desert 22. Homestead 23. A Ladder of Angels
"Sweeter than all the world is an enthralling saga of the Mennonite people and one man's emotional voyage into his own heritage. At the heart of the novel is Adam Wiebe, born to a homesteading prairie community. Love and success come easily to him until, faced with the collapse of his marriage and the disappearance of his daughter, he becomes obsessed with understanding his ancestral past." That past comes brilliantly alive as the story of the Mennonites weaves in and out of Adam's own: we are drawn into the great events of four centuries, from the horrors of the Reformation to the Red Army's advance into Germany at the close of World War II. Ambitious in its historical sweep, tender and humane, Sweeter than all the World sets one man's quest for family and love against generations of turmoil, laying bare the complexities of desire, faith and human frailty." (Book Cover)