In 2003, a mild-mannered historian named Moses Lapinsky jots down notes for a biography. It is to tell the tale of his father Sonny, a famous Jewish-Canadian boxer. As Moses buries himself in his research, he is transported back in time to the pivotal events of his father’s life. Throughout the five sections of the novel, each narrated by a different third person, we trace the fortunes of the Lapinskys—in particular the four sons—from the pivotal moment of the Christie Pits riots, through the years of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and all its attendant social tensions, World War II, into the post-war era that began to emerge in the early 1950s.