NEVER SAY WE GO LAST

A story based on two remarkable women—a heroine of Ukraine's underground and an enigmatic burn survivor—linked by a mysterious list that went missing from an SS Brigadefuehrer's tent at the end of WWII.

Caught between three worlds . . . Savka Ivanets—daughter of Ukraine to the underground resistance, and Untermensch female to the occupying Germans—is forced to become a Russian operative when she's wounded by an NKVD patrol in 1944, and her son Vas is captured. When she's ordered to find the Rimini List, which was taken by her husband Marko in the dying days of the war, Savka is torn from Ukraine, and embarks on a perilous journey from Berestechko to Krakow, from Berlin to England, and finally to Vancouver, where, in 1959, Marko disappears from a hospital ward. In 1972, Savka is reunited with her son Vas, who has survived the last 28 years in a Siberian gulag. Vas's investigation into his father's disappearance leads him to beautiful Salt Spring Island, where celebrated landscape artist Jeanie Esterhazy—locked in a power struggle with two ex-nurses and caregivers—is haunted by memories of a stranger standing in the doorway of her old hospital room. Jeanie and Vas bond on a level of embodied memory, as clues to his father's disappearance emerge from her tragic past. When Savka learns that her Russian handler murdered her family in Ukraine, she lures him to a final showdown on a beach on Salt Spring Island, where both she and Jeanie learn—in a series of dramatic twists—how each person who entered Jeanie's hospital room that night in 1959 had good reason to kill Marko Ivanets.
Maia Caron is a Nanaimo, British Columbia based Indigenous writer and author of Song of Batoche, a historical novel, which was a CBC must-read book for 2018. The Toronto Star described the novel as a “tale of love, betrayal and obsession,” and Shelagh Rogers of The Last Chapter said it was an “ambitious, broad, sweeping, historical mystery.”