Yes, all subsequent mercies must indeed have seemed small, blow-away small, compared to the monumental mercy that allowed a Dutch boy called Ernest Hillen to survive three and a half years behind the plaited-bamboo walls of a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.

Life in that camp on Java, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, was the stuff of The Way of a Boy, Hillen’s acclaimed 1993 memoir. In Small Mercies, Hillen, a longtime editor at Saturday Night, starts with freedom: 11-year-old Ernest and his Canadian-born mother are reunited with his Dutch father and brother.

“We Hillens were going to be a family again,” he writes. “We Hillens were going to live good and normal lives and live them in a safe and quiet place.”

That was the plan, but with the Indonesian independence movement growing more and more militant, Ernest’s parents decide that the post-war Indies are no place for young boys. Family will have to wait: while father stays on to work, boys and mother set out for the safety of Canada, there to find a home with relatives Ernest has never met.

Canada, it turns out, takes some getting to. First, there’s a long passage shipboard to England, where money and paperwork problems strand them temporarily in a strange land of boiled food, fog, and the waxworks of Madame Tussaud.

And then, Toronto. When the travellers arrive, finally, and move in with Ernest’s grandparents, it even appears as if this is the safe and quiet place in which normal lives have been awaiting them.

It’s not quite so easy, of course. The business of being a boy – and particularly of trying to achieve “ordinary Canadian boyness” – is fraught with pitfalls and uncertainty. What to do about “girl-thoughts?” How to avoid making Grandpa angry? Will the Hillens ever be a family again?

Small Mercies belongs on a shelf with the best memoirs to have been recently recollected. It doesn’t deal in international politics or history. As the title says, its jurisdiction is small, as small as an 11-year-old boy, and with all his life, innocence, and wisdom.