Claire Mulligan’s The Reckoning of Boston Jim is a beautiful book that wanders from England to the British Columbian gold rush, skipping across time as it interweaves the lives of three disparate people. At the heart of the story is Boston Jim, a strange man with no memory of his life before he appears as a child in a fur-trading fort on the West Coast in the early 1800s. Jim grows up to be a man of many skills with an unusual eidetic memory — he can recall virtually any story word for word, and he relies on this ability to keep himself amused on his journey.

In the Cowichan Valley, Jim encounters Dora, an Englishwoman waiting for her fiancé Eugene to return to her after making his fortune in the Cariboo gold rush. Dora returns something special to Jim that he had lost, and he wishes to return the favour. Searching the shops of Victoria, through the B.C. rainforest and down the coast for the perfect gift, Jim remembers the tales of her life she told him during their one short meeting.

While Jim searches for Dora’s present and she waits in the Cowichan Valley for the return of her lover, Eugene embarks on his own perilous journey to find gold and return to Dora. Mulligan captures the gritty flavour of the gold rush in the mid-1800s with all of its desperation. This is not an easy journey and men and animals die along the way, long before the gold fields are reached.

Eventually, Jim realizes that the one thing Dora truly wants is Eugene, and he sets out in pursuit of her lover. Meanwhile, Eugene is dreaming of gold and drinking the nights away with an assortment of shady acquaintances while he struggles towards the goldfields.

Mulligan weaves fact and fiction seamlessly, and sprinkles her narrative with fascinating details. At one point, an exhausted Eugene runs into a camel, the remains of a herd brought to British Columbia in the early 1800s. At a drunken wake, Eugene dances with the corpse, a gruesome incident based on a true story. Boston Jim is full of these rich and engaging details, creating a thoroughly researched, compelling story about a rich period in Canada’s history.