The year is 1938. Betrayed at Munich by European countries desperate to appease Hitler — “Peace in our time,” infamously crowed Neville Chamberlain — Czechoslovakia is about to be invaded by Germany. Toronto poet and novelist Alison Pick dissects this national tragedy in a multilayered narrative, a tale of betrayals large and small, that focuses on the fates of the Bauers, secular Czech Jews.

So much has been written about the Holocaust. Still, Pick, born in 1975 in Toronto and inspired by her Czech grandparents’ grueling five-year journey to Canada, spins a mesmerizing story, threading the personal with the political, the mysterious with the factual. It’s a page-turner

Allison Pick brings her award-winning poetic sensibilities to a difficult historical subject in Far to Go. A complex story of a family’s struggle set against the backdrop of the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, the novel focuses on the Bauer family, secular Jews caught in the rise of anti-Semitism...

Among readers of serious fiction, Jews and non-Jews, many cringe at the prospect of another novel centred on the Holocaust. Enough already, they moan. Is there anything new to be said? Move on, they urge. And yet. And yet.

By delicately tilting her observer’s mirror, Alison Pick glimpsed the outline of an original tale that could cast new light on old shadows — enough, I argue, that even the Holocaust-saturated will admit there’s room for more of these stories if their vantage point is well chosen....Pick wrote an earlier novel and several books of poetry. You might expect a few narrative arabesques; instead there are prosaic pratfalls, tired metaphors and similes, many involving fruit. A group of teenagers are “clustered together like grapes,” something inside of Marta hardens “like the pit at the centre of a piece of summer fruit” and then tightens “like the lid on a Mason jar.” Her story deserves more careful language....So the Holocaust persists in the literary imagination and through the refining fire of fiction a new generation confronts its own version of what it means to be human.

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The writing in Far to Go is clean, crisp and unencumbered. Pick never dwells for too long in an image or metaphor, and she creates small moments that are both lovely and frightening. At slightly more than 300 pages, the book resists the urge to overstay its welcome. It’s very deftly structured and the storytelling is seamless. With rights sold in the United States, Britain, Holland and Italy, Far to Go appears poised to gain a wide and significant readership, and deservedly so.