Strangers and Sojourners

Set in British Columbia, Strangers and Sojourners is the first volume in a set novels by Michael O'Brien tracing the lives of a family if exile over four generations. Beginning in 1900 the series follows Anne and Stephen Delaney and their descendants as they live through the tumultuous events of this century.

Anne is a highly educated Englishwoman who arrives in British Columbia at the end of the First World War. Raised in a family of spiritualists and Fabian socialists, she has fled civilization in search of adventure. She meets and eventually marries a trapper-homesteader, an Irish immigrant who is fleeing the "troubles" in his own violent past. This is a story about the gradual movement of souls from despair and unbelief to faith, hope, and love, about the psychology of perception, and about the ultimate questions of life, death and the mystery of being.