Edinburgh, 1917: Headstrong Highland lass Mary Stewart is a vibrant woman forced into the world's oldest profession in order to provide for her ailing father and younger sister in the city's Old Town. When her uncle, a well-to-do solicitor with political aspirations, thinks that her presence might impede his lofty ambitions he gives her a way out with dignity: a one-way ticket to the frontier town of Anyox, British Columbia, where nurses are needed to care for injured soldiers returning from the war.Mary agrees to depart Scotland and leaves her sister in the care of her uncle, but finds that a past like hers is not easy to escape, and that living on the frontier has more challenges than even the darkest streets of Old Town. She must survive by her quick intelligence, but that is a quality that few women were allowed to reveal.In his historical epic Dominion of Mercy, Danial Neil gives vivid life to the gritty world of an early twentieth-century mining town and a radiant protagonist who illuminates its dark corners with her insight, empathy, and bold spirit.

In this hauntingly beautiful novel with its palette of blues and greys, Danial Neil explores the world of Reuben Dale after the sudden death from a stroke of his beloved wife, June. Neil takes us inside suffering to show us the thoughts and feelings of the one left behind. Lost without the woman he has loved and leaned on, Reuben wanders aimlessly for a time in the little town of Seaside on the Sunshine Coast where he had retired with his wife with expectations of leisure time to sail. But now their sailboat, my June, named after his wife, remains tied to the dock. Ironically, just when he is beginning to develop a new place for himself in the daily life of Seaside, Reuben finds his past rising up to confront him, to demand radically new measures. Filled with superb renderings of the subtle beauties of the Sunshine Coast, this is a novel that shows that the past can be revisioned so as to create a new life from what remains. In the end, which turns out to be not an end, Reuben begins to find he can become the person he has never believed possible.