About the book: 1972 / Roy's book is one of the few where the destinies of Canada are compared with the destinies of the world. For the Canadian working class, exhausted by unemployment, the war turned out to be an unexpected facet: the army was a reliable defense against hunger. The conflict is typically Canadian, and has not manifested itself with similar severity either in Europe or in the United States. In the novel by Gabrielle Roy, this is essentially the moral dilemma facing the entire male population. And its solutions are identical: one after another, the heroes rush onto the “saving” raft of military mobilization, almost blessing the war that has broken out overseas... To the reader, the novel may seem both somewhat simple-minded and reporter-like straightforward. But in her book, Gabrielle Roy did not want to look back at the past; she spoke about the contradictions of the present and their projection into the future, touching on “the drama of an entire class».