The Beech For­est, this novel’s seem­ing­ly innocu­ous title, trans­lates to Buchen­wald in Ger­man. That word holds a lot of weight for Lisa Braun, a Cana­di­an of Ger­man ances­try who is mar­ried to Ger­hardt, a Ger­man immi­grant whose fam­i­ly lives in the shad­ow of the for­mer con­cen­tra­tion camp. At the start of the book, set around twen­ty years ago, Lisa is vis­it­ing her in-laws in Ger­many. Feel­ing out of sorts, she gets lost in the beech for­est and thinks about Hansel and Gre­tel, not­ing how ​“stoves and ovens seem to crop up often in Ger­man fairy tales.” She reflects on ear­li­er, dis­qui­et­ing encoun­ters with Gerhardt’s fam­i­ly: see­ing a fam­i­ly pho­to album fea­tur­ing an uncle in a Nazi uni­form, say, or hear­ing a grand­moth­er spout anti­se­mit­ic sen­ti­ments. Back home in rur­al Saskatchewan, an SS over­coat that Ger­hart picked up at a flea mar­ket serves as a lit­er­al man­i­fes­ta­tion of the ​“skele­ton” in the closet.

When her best friend moves away and Ger­hardt takes an extend­ed job out of town, Lisa, whose chil­dren are over­seas, begins to lose her sense of self. She feels adrift and alone, so unlike the younger, bold­er ver­sion of her­self, and ques­tions her life choic­es. She decides to take on a vol­un­teer gar­den­ing posi­tion at a senior com­mu­ni­ty, where she devel­ops a rap­port with Ben, an eru­dite Jew­ish Buchen­wald sur­vivor. Per­haps sens­ing that she is a kin­dred spir­it with a will­ing ear, Ben choos­es Lisa to be the recip­i­ent of his sto­ry — the full, shock­ing details of which he has nev­er shared with any­one. The deep­er Lisa gets into Ben’s tale and her own online Holo­caust research, the more she drinks and spends her nights mani­a­cal­ly clean­ing her house like a con­science-plagued Lady Mac­beth. In the process of his unbur­den­ing, Ben makes Lisa com­plic­it in his dis­turb­ing final act.

This is the sixth nov­el by Cana­di­an author Marlis Wes­sel­er, who has paint­ed a sen­si­tive por­trait of a mid­dle-aged woman in cri­sis. Despite the gen­er­a­tions of trau­ma and alien­ation that rever­ber­ate through both Lisa’s and Ben’s fam­i­lies, Wes­sel­er seems to sug­gest that rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and redemp­tion are possible.