Like memory itself, this book moves backwards and forwards between the distant and the recent past, between Prebble's recollections of his own life and of the history he has written about. Three times and places have the place of honour in his autobiography - like the crofters a century and more before him whose passages to the New World he chronicled, Prebble emigrated with his parents to Canada where they hoped to build a new life on the great prairies. Many years later, in 1945, he was a soldier in Germany, looking at the horrors and absurdities of war, and above all, when he afterwards found his career as a writer.