The People’s Act of Love takes place in a remote Siberian village called Yasyk in 1919 when the Bolshevik Revolution is consolidating power, driving out the Tsarist Whites. Yasyk is home to an ascetic cult of castrates, a remnant of a regiment of Czechoslovakian soldiers waiting for orders to go back home, and Anna Petrovna with her son. Anna came to Yasyk after learning her husband, a hussar, died in the war. The leader of the Czechs is a sociopathic madman named Captain Matula whose life was saved by Mutz, an outsider among the Czechs as he is Jewish and somewhat of a philosopher at heart.

All the Czechs long to go home, though Mutz suspects Matula does not and is perhaps lying to them about their orders. After all, he’s the lord and master of Yasyk and back in Czechoslovakia he would be a small fish in a big pond and perhaps held to account for a massacre of civilians he ordered. It is all coming to a head, though, as the Red Army is approaching.

Into this already tense setting comes Samarin, an escaped political prisoner with a story of a prison called the White Garden in the far north of Siberia more than a thousand miles from anywhere. He claimed he escaped with another prisoner, the Mohican, who took him along as his pig’ whom he had fattened with extra rations so that when the food ran out, he could eat him. He warns people the Mohican is coming, but somehow Samarin is here alive, still uneaten.

To complicate matters, a shaman being held prisoner was murdered and Samarin seemed the obvious suspect but while he was testifying to Matula and the officers, another person was murdered. Not to mention, the body of a soldier with his hand cut off outside the village with a much older, long-dead hand laid on top of it. It would be easier to blame it all on the new arrival, but that is impossible.

The People’s Act of Love has many deep questions about sin, faith, extremism, and morality. The castrates cut off their sexual organs to remove sin and the knowledge of sin, to become angels. But does that act really remove them from them their very human sins? The book opens with Samarin falling for a woman who is eventually charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. The question is what justifies evil acts? Does political belief justify a bombing? Does survival needs justify treating a human being like livestock, fattening it up to eat later? What if the motive was love? What justifies killing another?

“What looks like an act of evil to a single person is the people’s act of love to its future self,” Samarin says. There are no easy answers in this book.