True Patriot Love

In his prize-winning memoir, The Russian Album, Michael Ignatieff chronicled the fortunes of his father's family in Russia and in Canada. Now, in True Patriot Love, Ignatieff turns to his mother's family, the Grants. Over three generations the Grants conducted a spirited public argument about what Canada was and should be. True Patriot Love is both a tribute to and a reckoning with that inheritance. In 1872, the author's great-grandfather George Monro Grant, set out with Sandford Fleming to map out the railway line that would link Canada from ocean to ocean. His grandfather William Lawson Grant fought at the Somme in World War I and came home believing that Canada had earned the right to call itself a fully independent nation. His son George Grant, author of Lament for a Nation, believed that Canada had gone from colony to nation and back to colonyżof the United States. Michael Ignatieff retells the history of his ancestors as a story of one family's search for Canada. He has turned a family memoir into a history of their love of country.