Sweeter Than All The World — Rudy Wiebe

At once an enthralling saga of the Mennonite people and one man's emotional voyage into his heritage and his own self-discovery, Sweeter Than All the World takes us on an extraordinary odyssey.

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. Here, Wiebe has sought out real historical characters to tell an extraordinary story.

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. This is a compassionate, erudite and stimulating work of fiction that shares the deep-rooted concerns of all of Wiebe' s work: how to make history live in our imagination, and how we can best live our lives.