It's 1913 and a young, carefree and recklessly innocent girl, Mina, goes out into the forest on the edge of the Baltic sea and meets a gang of rowdy young men with revolution on their minds. It sounds like a fairy tale but it's life.

The adventure leads to flight, emigration and a new land, a new language and the pursuit of idealism or happiness - in Liverpool. But what of the stories from the old country; how do they shape and form the next generations who have heard the well-worn tales?

From the flour mills of Latvia to Liverpool suburbia to post-war Soho, The Story of the Forest is about myths and memory and about how families adapt in order to survive. It is a story full of the humour and wisdom we have come to relish from this wonderful writer.

Not my usual kind of read so I didn't really know what to expect but I found myself really enjoying it and it has inspired me to read more out of my comfort zone

This was a great read. I loved reading about Jewish family traditions. I found the story very engaging from the beginning and I read it in one day as I am on holiday. I loved the setting of the forest it was very well written.

A folk tale begins when a person sets out on a journey. On this occasion it’s a curly haired Jewish girl called Mina Mendel who is going into a forest in Lativa to hunt for mushrooms.
She hears drinking songs and the singers sound drunk.
There is a point at which you go forward or turn back, you have to choose, so Mina Mendel steps towards them and the story begins.
An utterly amazing read, and loved that it’s setting is in a Forest 🌳 and that the novel deals with roots and uprooting
Thanks @lindasgrant @viragopress & @netgalley for the eARC

Searching for that piece of home to complete the jigsaw of life’s story 3.5 rating, raised

I will always read a book by Linda Grant, with anticipation and appreciation, even if with this one I am left not quite as absorbed and expanded as I usually am.

Starting in Latvia, in 1913, this is a story of diaspora across 100 years, of relocation in part through individual choice and psyche, and also through political and cultural earthquakes, where individual lives meet the inexorable weight of history rolling along

Mina, a young girl of 14, daughter of a reasonably well to do flour merchant, is filled with the kind of inchoate yearnings for ‘something more’ in her life than the stultifying traditions of a woman’s life in this time, place, and culture. She enters the forest to collect mushrooms for her family, walking into all those well told paths of myth and fairy story that young girls in forests are part of. And collides with history. Not a traumatic collision, but rather one which sows a seed of ideological curiosity.

Stepping out of received ideas of what one’s place and story should be, can always seem transgressive. Especially for women in history.

Through the forest encounter, Mina and her older brother Jossel will leave Latvia. Bound for America, various events mean their lives unfold instead in Liverpool, and that the major conflagrations of the twentieth century leave both outside personal annihilation.

The journey now will be the tension between the maintenance of their cultural, religious and national identify, and the desire to assimilate and advance their personal family trajectory in the new land.

As usual with Grant, there are wonderfully rich and complex characters, family dynamics, narratives across time, and a web of connections and dislocations to explore.

Both Mina, and her daughter Paula are strong and spirited women of depth and complexity. They are united by this sense of yearning for something more, something different.

Part, also of this book’s exploration is story itself. We pass down, not just objects – some of which might have stories associated, to the next generation – who pass those objects to their descendants – but also, stories.

Stories are trickier, they morph, developing, acquiring new shapes and forms, losing and gaining different versions of ‘truth’. And even, acquiring new meanings

I did enjoy this read – and particularly Paula’s journey, but something in this book prevented total engagement. Maybe it was the big skips over missing pieces of history – as of course, happens in ALL our stories.

The wrap, the ending, the tie up into ‘and then, the story continues…..’ somehow encapsulated this sense of things falling a bit flat.

I enjoyed this book immensely. The beginning is immediately gripping: shades of Little Red Riding Hood as Mina goes into the forest to collect mushrooms. She meets a group of young Bolshevik men and, while we can breathe a sigh of relief as she comes to no obvious harm, it's a life-changing - even life-saving - experience.

The story of the Mendels, as they travel from Riga to England and realise that this is not just a staging post on the way to their goal of America but the place where they must make their new lives, has some commonality with the journey of my maternal grandparents and the experience of immigrant arrival and gradual assimilation resonates with me. The characters are vivid and very credible. I liked Mina's bossy sister-in-law Lia whose practical approach got the family safely settled and later led them on to life in the suburbs, a process beautifully depicted. Their experiences in business and Mina's work in a munitions factory are also very well drawn.

The plot twisted delightfully to bring Louis and Mina together, and again with the post-war re-emergence of Itzik, Mina's wicked brother. None of this required me to suspend my disbelief: such coincidences do happen in fractured families. The pace of the family story is maintained through the account of the experiences of the subsequent generations.

Mina's story of her forest experience is told and retold through the years, including one cinematic retelling. It is the foundation story of this family, for, if it hadn't happened, they would not have existed. And at the end Mina's great-granddaughter encounters the story in yet another way, providing a perfect ending to the book.

So why didn't I give it five stars? Well, all the female characters are strong, admirable women but I somehow yearned for a male character I could really like. Too many nebbishes...

Linda Grant's novel follows the story of a Jewish family over nearly a century from Riga to Liverpool and London. The novel begins in 1913 with the titular 'story of the forest': 14-year-old Mina Mendel collecting mushrooms in the forest, 'like a child in a fairytale', where an encounter with some Bolsheviks will cause Mina and her brother Jossel to leave Latvia heading for New York. This yarn is repeated, distorted and increasingly disbelieved over successive generations, like many of the other stories told by different members of the family.

Mina and Jossel never make it to New York because of the First World War, and instead stay put in Liverpool. What follows is a highly absorbing depiction of life in Liverpool's small Jewish community across the changing social mores of 20th century, including marriage and divorce, business and religious observance. We also follow Mina's daughter Paula to London in the late 1940s, where she works first as a secretary and then a continuity girl for a small film company, and I particularly enjoyed the period detail in this section.

Not all of the Mendel family travel to the UK and I was intrigued by the obliqueness with which Grant depicts the fate of Jews left in mainland Europe and the USSR. For many years, Mina and Jossel do not know what has happened to their siblings or parents; later, 'the camps' are referred to but never described in detail. There is something rather bold but also poignant about writing a novel about 20th Century Jewish history which is not centred on the Holocaust; while we are still painfully aware of its horrors, Grant shines a light on other lives and experiences which are less well-known.

I found this novel fascinating and compelling, both as a work of social history and as a meditation on the power of stories in families, particularly families where so much else is lost. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

The Story of the Forest has its origins in Linda Grant’s family history. Originating from Eastern Europe and Jewish, her family name was Ginsburg but changed in the UK to assimilate and avoid anti-semitism.
It is a story of generations begun from immigrants and how their history becomes fables; stories are altered or changed depending on the world view of the narrator. This could be said for any family story passed down by oral tradition.
I enjoyed the insights into Jewish traditions and family life. The novel makes you think about your own family, its genealogy and stories.

In The Story of the Forest, which begins in a Latvian forest in 1915 and spans the remainder of the twentieth century, Linda Grant assembles a glorious cast of characters who are forced by circumstances to grapple with new lives in new lands, shadowed by their traditions and the fate of the people they left behind. The book is beautifully written and switches seamlessly between the different key characters, painting a vivid picture of the ups and downs of their lives. This novel is filled with humour, humanity and love and I'd highly recommend it (I'd love to see it adapted for TV as well!).

I’d describe this book as realistic fiction. The author has done an amazing job of creating imaginary characters and situations that depict the world and society. The characters focus on themes of growing, self-discovery and confronting personal and social problems.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, no significant gaps between words some text written has been typed in red and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.