“The Kurapaty mass grave near Minsk, Belarus, was used to hide the bodies of thousands murdered by Stalin’s secret police from 1937 to 1941. This novel of witness tells the story of the prosecution of a war criminal hiding in Canada. There is self-discovery. There is torture and false confession. There are affidavits and dark nights of the soul. There is Leah’s painful search for witnesses driven by her “damaged, obstinate heart.” And searingly, as McCormack writes, there are the voices of the dead who cry out, “We are here. We are waiting.” Know this history through your heart, through the empathetic imagination of McCormack’s fiction.” – Kim Echlin, author of The Disappeared

“In this hypnotically layered novel, a young Jewish lawyer, Leah Jarvis, is assigned the case of Stefan Drozd, a nonagenarian war criminal facing deportation for acts he committed as a minor in Belarus. McCormack treats her characters with unnerving fairness, balancing terror with beauty, a brutal childhood with an odd and loving one, and somehow squeezing out of the reader sympathy for Drozd—until horror precludes it. Deeply intelligent and deeply moral, The Singing Forest shows that, like glass, truth is amorphous. It also makes the case that, though ‘there is no general duty to rescue’ in law, a family might save a child, as it did Leah. Or it may, like Drozd, make a monster of him.”—Caroline Adderson, author of A History of Forgetting and A Russian Sister

“Sometimes, as a reader, you put down a book in wonder, because you have been inside the mind of a deep and seeing writer, whose vision of the world is captivating, original and illuminating. Such a writer is Judith McCormack. In vibrant and nuanced language McCormack spirals us into the heart of a war criminal, and the brilliant lawyer who unravels the workings of his mind. Dark, disturbing, dazzling – this is an unflinching look at evil – and yet, and here is McCormack’s genius, we emerge more whole. The Singing Forest is an absolute triumph!” – Shaena Lambert, author of Petra and Oh, My Darling

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