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This historical novel is about a 1910s Scottish sex worker turned immigrant Canadian nurse named Mary Stewart. It's Victorian-novel-esque in its plotting and character: people's actions and dialogue are big and bold and there is ample tension and epic drama. The first half takes place in Edinburgh and the second in a small copper smelter town on the northern coast of B.C. named Anyox, which I loved as a rough, visceral, complicated setting.