Green returns to the history of his own family with the prequel to his critically acclaimed SHADOW OF ASHLAND. This is the story of Martin Radey, Green's grandfather. Radey, the child of Irish immigrant parents in late nineteenth-century Canada, lived most of his life in Toronto, for years a single parent after the death of his young wife. But this is his story beginning at the moment of his death, drifting backward and starting again from his early life, a search for meaning in a welter of change and occasional tragedy.