Mouse and the cossacks

the long version

'The first thing you have to know about me is that I have no voice' Mouse de Bruin has been completely silent since a trauma at the age of eight. She communicates in notes and emails and is very observant. When she moves with her mother to a deserted farmhouse in the Pennines, she becomes intrigued by the traces of the previous inhabitant's life there, William Caxton, a schoolteacher who served as an officer at the camp of the Russian White Army during World War 2. Who is the mysterious Anna he has addressed so many letters about his past to? Like a detective, Mouse researches his recent movements, his links with his neighbours and an Albanian refugee, and - most devastatingly - his secret wartime past. With the example of William's extraordinary life, Mouse begins to conceive an escape from her own damaging past and to find a way to live in the present.