A Fist Around the Heart

Two sisters, forever tied by love and sadness. The life of Anna Grieve and her fragile older sister, Esther, begins in Russia in the 1880s. The violent persecution of Jews leads their mother to a fateful decision, to send the girls away with her wealthy employers—halfway across the world to Winnipeg. The girls are never at ease in their new home. Esther’s beauty and glamour hide the fact that she is losing herself to mental illness. Anna, always the misfit and the rebel, leaves as soon as she can for New York where she reinvents herself as a women’s rights activist in Manhattan, running an illegal contraceptive business in the shadows. Anna spends her life torn between taking care of Esther and escaping her, never understanding the true depth of her sister’s anguish. When Anna hears the news of Esther’s death on an historic day in WWII, her world comes to a halt. She must travel back to Winnipeg to find out why. Was it a suicide? Did the events of the war play a part, or is that a coincidence? Anna’s search for answers will take her back to the violence of their childhood in Russia, to years of suppressed memories and untold stories of the family they left behind, and finally back to that fateful day during WWII.