For a novel that begins with a grisly stabbing and features three other murders, Britt Holmström’s Claudia is surprisingly upbeat. Indeed, the cactus flower on the cover is a fitting symbol of the book’s central message: that beauty can arise from harsh and damaging environments.
    Claudia, the narrator, was born in Sweden to a young Latvian woman, Malda, who escaped her country just hours ahead of German tanks. Malda overcomes adversity, marrying a big-hearted Canadian doctor who brings her and Claudia back to Canada. Claudia adapts to her new country, marries well, and lives a conventional Canadian middle-class life. When the novel opens, though, she is a fiftysomething widow, trying to make sense of her Latvian heritage, the violence she has witnessed, and the problems of life at the beginning of the 21st century.
    Three of the four people murdered in the book are young women, and a young girl who enters toward the end of the story is kidnapped and forced to become a sex slave. Another writer might have been tempted to turn these characters and events into a screed against men or a rant about the dangers women face. But Holmström is writing about the human condition in general, even if her most vivid characters are women.
    Holmström has published two other novels before this, but Claudia reads as if it were the story she has been waiting to write. She crams more than 60 years of personal and international history into its 350-odd pages, and highlights it all with semi-mythic connections that transcend time. The story she tells is engaging on a realistic level, but the magical elements do stick out rather awkwardly, as if impaled on a cactus thorn.