This novel follows Eleanor Burden, a woman with a peculiar responsibility. She has returned from a visit to Vienna in 1898 with a secret destiny. Although she lost the “love of her life”, she carries home with her a mysterious journal that lays out her future and that of the world. Once back in Boston, she marries stolid banker Frank Burden and takes her place in society while secretly pursuing the tasks assigned to her by the journal.

As she moves forward through the events of the early 20th century, such as the sinking of the Titanic and two world wars, she meets and works with many giants of history, such as William James, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. A few hints are dropped about the origins of the journal and a man named Wheeler Burden.

I didn't realise when I started it that this book is a sequel to his first novel, The Little Book. Although reviews say that it can stand alone, reading the first book, in which Wheeler is apparently the main character, would have allayed the rather frustrating withholding of information through far too much of the book. Much would have been clear right from the beginning if I'd read the earlier book.

The tone is quite distant and dry, that of someone from the future, a historian, recounting the events of Eleanor’s life and assuming her feelings and reactions based on extensive research. Documents such as letters and journals are cited, supplemented with enough dramatic scenes to keep the story alive. Due to this voice, I found it hard to engage with the characters. They seemed created to serve the plot rather than the plot growing out of the characters.

The story, though, intrigued me. Eleanor's commitment to fulfilling her destiny and her occasional questioning and despair provide fascinating insight into questions of predestination and free will. The philosophies and theories of Freud and Jung are described adroitly and fit naturally into the story. They contribute to the uncertainty about what constitutes sanity and what psychosis.

Historical details reveals the extent of the author's research. I enjoyed experiencing the grand sweep of history in a single novel, reminding of taking Western Civilisation at university from a professor who announced each new dizzying wave with the words, “We now see appearing on the horizon . . .”

Essentially a fairy tale, the story received many rave reviews. Perhaps I would not be so lukewarm in my praise if I'd read its predecessor. What sequels have you read that truly stand alone?

It's always interesting how one person can love a book, rave that it's the best book ever, and the next person find it ho-hum. One of my book clubs selected Mitchell's book at the urging of one member, backed up by glowing reviews. One professional reviewer called it a page-turner; for me, not so much.

Jacob de Zoet, an earnest and honest young man, comes to Japan in 1799—a five-year undertaking—to earn enough money to be acceptable to his fiancé's father back home in The Netherlands. Jacob and the other employees of the Dutch East Indies Company are confined to a small artificial island called Dejima that sits in Nagasaki harbor, connected to the city by a well-guarded land bridge.

No other European country has ties with Japan. Fearful of outside influences, especially Christian ones after putting down a bloody rebellion, Japan enforces a policy of strict isolation. Only on rare occasions is the Chief invited across the bridge to confer with the Chamberlain, and the Japanese are not allowed to go to Dejima except as translators, soldiers, and—rarely—students. The Dutch workers are not allowed on pain of death to bring any Christian artifacts onto the island, a rule Jacob, the son of a preacher, immediately breaks.

Arriving with Jacob is Vorstenbosch, who will be the interim Chief since the previous one passed away. He sets Jacob the task of untangling the financial records, mangled during the corrupt rule of his predecessor. Of course, curtailing their thievery doesn't endear Jacob to the others, a rough bunch of louts.

Despite my friend's recommendation, I was bored by the first part of the book: uninteresting and unpleasant characters, all familiar types; unclear plot direction; ugly environment. Mitchell embraces the trendy aesthetic of frenetic jump cuts made more hyper by the use of present tense. Short scenes are thrown at the reader with no transitions between them and no connecting narrative. There's little foreshadowing, and multiple plotlines are left hanging. I felt like I was being pelted with sharp bits of glass that may or may not ever be used to form a coherent mosaic.

The second part abandons Dejima entirely, going off into the countryside to follow two Japanese characters. At least they each have a plotline. Later we return to Dejima, but not to Jacob's exclusive point of view. We debated at some length about what purpose the second part serves and how it relates to the rest of the novel, if at all. As one member of my book club said, it is as though the second part is a different book entirely, a Gothic novel stuck in the middle of an incredibly detailed realistic novel about life in this lonely outpost at the end of the 18th century.

The details are indeed amazing. Mitchell's research is formidable, especially about the minutiae of everyday life. I appreciated the harsh realism; most historical novels draw a sentimental veil over some of the more pungent facts of life in olden days, like the bathing only once or twice a year or the primitive lavatories. There are moments when the book rises to greatness, a few passages here and there that moved me deeply and that I will remember for a long time. One member of the book club noted a small chapter from the point of view of a slave, unconnected to anything else in the book, which she called a “jewel”, so beautifully written.

I struggled with the story, bewildered by the choppy writing and lack of a traditional narrative arc. The use of the present tense puts the reader more in the moment but adds to the feeling of whiplash. But I'll caution again that just because it wasn't to my taste doesn't mean it won't be to yours. Certainly many people love it. And even within our small group, one person liked the first part and not the rest, another the second, while I really only liked the third part.

What we did agree on was the perpetual relevance of the theme of corruption and dishonesty, not perhaps the main theme of the book but certainly present throughout. While I would like to believe people will behave well even when they are not observed, many do not. One of our members told a story of a briefcase left on a subway in Japan that was still on the seat when the train completed its circuit and returned to the station, followed by her recent trip to Heathrow where someone's suitcase had sprung open on the luggage carousel; by the time it came around again everything had been stolen by the other passengers. We went on to talk about the corrupt practices in some of our city's departments. So the book is definitely a good one for prompting book club discussions.

To complete such a complex and ambitious novel is a huge accomplishment. That it didn't appeal to me shouldn't keep you from trying it. I certainly admire the book and recognise Mitchell's achievement.

How have I not come across award-winning mystery writer Thomas H. Cook before? True, this book is labeled a thriller, not a genre I usually read, but it unrolls at such a deliberate and elegant pace that it turns out to be exactly my cup of tea.

Philip Anders, a middle-aged literary critic, is shocked by the death of his best friend, the successful writer Julian Wells, at the home Julian shared with his sister in Montauk on Long Island. Though the two have known each other since childhood, Philip cannot imagine why Julian would commit suicide. He tells Loretta that he wishes he'd been there to stop him, but is flummoxed when he realises that, not knowing the cause of Julian's despair, he doesn't know what he could have said to stay his friend's hand.

To answer that question, Philip begins retracing Julian's footsteps, trying to learn where things went sideways. Although Julian wrote true crime books about history's greatest monsters, serial killers like Andre Chikatilo and Countess Báthory, immersing himself in their darkness, there is no easy answer, no new disappointment to explain his action.

Philip starts to question his own understanding, recalling that he has never understood the dedication in Julian's first book to “Philip, sole witness to my crime.” It was written after the time the two men spent together in Argentina toward the end of that country's Dirty War. The gay adventure had turned dark when their tour guide, Marisol, disappeared. The two searched unsuccessfully for her. Despite the ugliness and atrocities of the time, she seemed so transparently innocent of political involvement that there had to be another explanation.

As some of us were discussing at my poetry reading this week, one of the tasks of middle age seems to be to discover or refine the narrative of your life. Real life is a crazy jumble of false starts, accidents, and serendipity. As we blunder through, trying sometimes just to make it to the end of the day, or at most till Friday, we construct a sort of narrative of cause and effect, intention and resolution. Nearing the last part of life, many feel the need to smooth the rough patches and fit the outliers into the pattern. Julian's death pushes Philip to do just that, and he begins pursuing Julian through his books.

The writing is masterly; the pacing magnificent. I love an intelligent read like this, one that challenges my preconceptions and delivers a satisfying conclusion. My only quibble is a personal one: I hated the descriptions of the terrible crimes committed by Julian's real-life subjects. Call me lily-livered, but it seems to me that these days gore is way overdone. Television dramas complete to show the most grisly remains, the worst tortures, the most terrifying serial killers. Actually, though, as Hitchcock showed us, the most terrifying moments are the most banal: a footstep outside the shower curtain, a game by two college students, the lit window of a passing train. In retrospect I understand why the carnage here is necessary to the story; I just don't like it.

I do like the book, though; it is easily one of the best books I've read all year. It made me questions and rethink some basic precepts. Philip quotes his friend: “‘There is no more haunting story than that of an unsolved crime.'” Truly this is a story that will haunt me.

I was saddened to learn of Heaney's death this week at what seems to me now the young age of 74. In his honor I salvaged this 2010 collection of his poetry from the depths of my to-be-read pile.

What a treat it is! First the cover, a detail from an illuminated manuscript of The Divine Comedy, a row of sages in red and yellow robes, hands linked, against a deep indigo sky. The lower part, where the men stand, is somewhat damaged, the paint cracked. Their expressions vary from sad to stern to pleased.

Then there is the title, a marvel of compression, but one that seemingly holds no mystery. I thought first of the obvious: passing fire buckets and parent to child and our strands of DNA. Read on, though, as these poems draw us close and even closer to mysteries such as “a wood that talked in its sleep” or “a wrist protruding like an open spout”.

Turning to the first poem, I was beguiled. Describing one brief moment, Heaney almost casually opens it out to encompass a world of meaning. Every poem left me dreaming and thinking and rereading. His use of language, seemingly simple phrases, is extraordinary, each word, each phrase packed with meaning.

Heaney's intense focus on the smallest of details gives these brief poems resonance. This poem, where he describes three occasions when he might have embraced his father, made me feel again the last weeks of my own father's life.

And the third

Was on the landing during his last week,
Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm
Taking the webby weight of his underarm.

His poems though brief seem the result of thought and long deliberation. He takes commonplace happenings and comes at them slantwise to see them afresh. Even the small moment of being left at school by his parents yields a powerful emotion:

Seeing them as a couple, I now see,

For the first time, all the more together
For having had to turn and walk away, as close
In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.

In these poems he brings together and shares tesserae from all of his ages—climbing with Jim Hawkins into the ship's rigging, buying a used copy of the Aeneid, being carried on a stretcher, hearing funeral bells toll. Heaney fashions the final mosaics, examining the questions that absorb us at the end: what is the use of a life, my father's life, my own?

Celebrate the man. Read his work.

Like most readers, I'm attracted to a book by its cover. I've been meaning to read some of Auster's books, and fell in love with the cover to this one. It's a photograph of a completely white room, vaguely industrial, with exposed pipes and heating ducts, furnished only with a cot placed under the single window and a desk and chair. So far, we're talking about my fantasy through all the years of being a single mom working multiple jobs—perhaps every writer's dream—of a place where no one would bother me and I could just write.

However, smack dab in front of the bed, there's a white horse, standing there staring out at the reader. So even before starting to read, I know we've entered the realm of the surreal. The story starts with a man sitting on the bed in that room (minus the horse). Everything in the room is labeled: wall, desk, etc. He can't remember his name or why he is there. He's not sure if he's been locked in or is free to go. I thought at first it was a prison cell; then perhaps a hospital room, but we are not told.

Of course, by this time I'm thinking of Kafka, but I'm also thinking about my recurrent struggles to pull up the word or name that has just slipped my mind. We decide to call the man Mr. Blank. Throughout the day, Mr. Blank is visiting by a number of people who bring meals or harangue him. All the while he is struggling to remember who these people are, why he feels guilty when he looks at the photographs on the desk. Also on the desk are two manuscripts which he starts reading.

If I'd read other Auster books, I'd have twigged to what was going on sooner, but it still didn't take me long. Scary, amusing, self-referential, the story unfolds quickly. Auster is known for postmodernist games, but this brief book reads more like a fable or a cautionary tale. By coming at his subject sideways, Auster manages to surprise and intrigue a (on some topics, at least) jaded reader like me.

This 2012 novel is a departure for Toni Morrison. It's much shorter than her other novels; the language is unusually spare; and the structure sets her an intriguing challenge. My book club all enjoyed it, and found much to discuss. Home is the story of Frank Money, back a year from Korea and still suffering from what today we would call PTSD: periods of rage or lethargy, lost time that he cannot recall. We first meet him waking up in a mental hospital in restraints after one of these episodes. He has to escape, though, and get back to Georgia to rescue his little sister.

Unwilling to go back to Lotus, Georgia when he was first discharged, he has only recently found a measure of peace in a relationship with a woman named Lily, when he receives a mysterious note that says, “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.” Rescuing his sister from whatever is threatening her has been the driving force of his life, right up until he and his two best friends joined the Army to escape from the boring emptiness of Lotus. They both died in Korea, and Frank cannot bear to face their families. But he has to go to his sister, who works for a doctor outside of Atlanta, and he has to get there as fast as he can. It is not clear what city he is in, perhaps fittingly, but has to make his way to Portland—Oregon, I assume—and then to Chicago before going on to Atlanta. Once he finds her, the only place he can take her is Lotus.

The chapters alternate, more or less, with a first person narrative by Frank. He speaks directly to whoever is telling the story. The other chapters, while all third person point of view, move between the characters: one being close in on Cee, Frank's sister; another on Lily; another on Frank's step-grandmother, etc. This structure becomes an extraordinary exercise in voice, as Morrison slightly adapts the language and the syntax for each character: Cee's helplessness showing in incomplete sentences and dreamy descriptions, for example, while Lily's practicality comes across in unadorned, businesslike prose.

While the title makes it clear that this is a story about home, it is also a story about fighting: what we fight for, who we perceive as the enemy, or when instead of fighting we disappear in the night. Scattered throughout the story are incidents of the casual violence and injustice that people of color suffered during the 1950s, more widespread than those today.

At least one person in my book club remained unconvinced by Frank's return to Lotus, by his finding it no longer the straitjacket it seemed to him as a boy, but instead the ideal place to live. Of course, our view of things changes as we grow older, but to me the appeal Lotus holds for Frank is its safety. It is the one place where he and Cee are safe, just as it was the safe place his parents fled to when driven from their homes in Texas, and the place their step-grandmother came to hide from those who shot her first husband because they wanted his gas station.

While one might think Lotus is the home referred to in the title, what the story tells us is that home isn't a place. It's even more than the strong bond of family: Frank and Cee became so close because their parents, working multiple jobs, ignored them; their grandfather didn't care about them; and his wife actively abused them. No, the real home here is the community: the collection of women who nurse Cee back to health, the people who take care of the orphaned boy who stumbles into town, the men who help Frank out along the road.

I understood what my book club friend meant, though, because I too thought Frank's change a bit abrupt. The story sometimes seemed more like a fable than events naturally unfolding. Yet I read it through almost in one sitting, captivated by the characters. I finished it full of admiration for Morrison for trying something new, something so challenging, at this point in her career. I went back to look at how she created all these subtly different voices while at the same time maintaining a consistent narrative tone: a remarkable accomplishment. Read it for the story, and then admire the risk-taking and the mastery.

This debut novel follows three generations of women. While relationships lie at the core of this light, enjoyable read, some weightier issues of history and identity make it stand out.

The story opens with Lisa, born in the U.S. of Taiwanese parents. She is 32 and a single mother with a string of failed, dead-end jobs behind her. When she gets laid off from her latest job as a housekeeper in a senior home, she stops on her way out to grab a couple of folders from the empty receptionist's desk, thinking they would look good as portfolios for her resumé. One of the folders turns out to be that of Jack and Fei Chen, residents of the senior home, and Lisa promises herself that she will return it.

A rebel from childhood whose father died before she was born, Lisa's wild youth left her pregnant after a one-night stand at a rock concert. Daughter Abbey, named for the Beatles album, is the opposite, a hard-working fifth-grader who vies with a classmate for the valedictorian spot in her elementary school. However, she keeps her academic awards in her school locker because it upsets her grandmother to see her do well.

Abbey is close to her grandmother, whom she calls Ah-Mah, and loves visiting her on Saturdays for lessons in the Taiwanese language, sessions which are torture to Lisa. There's a turbulent history between Lisa and her mother. Silk still mourns for her husband, Lu, killed along with other intellectuals and elites by the Kuomintang during the White Terror following the 228 uprising in Taiwan. She has made a life for herself in the U.S. working long hours in a vineyard, preferring physical labor, but has never lost her fear of and hatred for the Chinese who took over and despoiled her country and her life. When Lisa befriends an elderly Chinese man who works as a maintenance man at Lisa's school and brings him to dinner at Silk's home, it is the last straw.

I appreciated learning more about Taiwan's history. I knew about Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalists, a.k.a. the Kuomintang, taking refuge there in 1949 after they were driven out of mainland China by Mao Zedong's Communists and creating the Republic of China. I've followed the competing claims of the two Chinese governments—the ROC on Taiwan and the People's Republic of China on the mainland—as to which was the legitimate government of China.

But I'm embarrassed to say that I had not thought much about what happened on Taiwan when the Kuomintang arrived. In fact, they took over Taiwan four years earlier, in 1945, when it was turned over to them by Japan at the end of WWII, Japan having ruled the island since 1895, at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War. Although I would have thought the Taiwanese, ethnically Chinese themselves, would have welcomed the return to Chinese rule, in fact they resented the incoming Kuomintang whose high-handed and corrupt behavior led to inflation and other economic woes and who had no hesitation about violently putting down any unrest.

This history is only lightly touched on in the story, though its legacy drives Silk, and through her, her daughter and granddaughter. I'd expected to identify with Lisa as a single mother, rebellious in her youth and paying for it now. However, it was Silk who most captured my attention, her strength and determination, her sometimes misguided attempts to protect what is left of her family.

The story moves quickly. Conflicts that arise are usually resolved by the end of the same chapter. The chapters are only a handful of pages long, written in present tense.

Abbey closes her notebook and sighs. She looks around the empty campus. It's a half-day at school today because of teacher in-service. She's already completed all of tonight's assignments, but her mom still hasn't arrived. She bets her mom doesn't even remember the shortened day even though she insisted on picking Abbey up in Ah-Mah's car.

The brief sentences and short chapters make the story spin by until the final threads are wrapped up in the end. This book would make a great beach read and is appropriate for the Young Adult reader as well as for adults.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a digital copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The book begins with Grace, a calm and confident therapist in Montreal, who hasn't seemed to have connected with anyone since her divorce. It continues with sections centered on one of her patients, Annie, 16 years old with braces and a cutting habit, and Grace's ex-husband, Mitch, also a therapist who leaves the woman he’s been living with to work for a month in a remote Arctic village. They each pick up unlikely strays, passing the point of agreement barely registering that they've even made a choice.

I’ve been curious for some time about what we owe each other. I believe in personal responsibility and that as part of a community we are responsible for each other. To a point. As one character notes, you can’t help everybody. For a therapist, of course, it must be especially hard to find that balance, to care enough about the people who come to you to listen and go beyond listening to what they are not telling you, but not to care so much that you go over the line that is the limit of your responsibility. But then when it comes to your personal relationships, how do you continue across that line you’ve worked so hard to draw? And how do you not feel like a failure, both as a therapist and as a person, when a patient succumbs in spite of your efforts? Other characters in this book struggle with what they owe their parents, balancing the need to escape with the depth of the tie.

I’d looked forward to some new insight about how much to give; what's too much; what's not enough. However, the situations the characters find themselves in are so outlandish that I cannot extract anything that speaks to life as I know it. Still, seeing my questions worked out in the context of therapists provides an interesting slant.

As I was reading, I mostly bought it, going along as situations start out badly and get worse. Once in a while, I found some of the characters so distasteful and some of their motives so mysterious that I had trouble going on. But I was glad I stuck with it. And certainly there was much that I recognised, such as the characters who hid themselves and didn't want finding.

The second time I read it, I was more willing to let go of my preconceptions, but was reading more for craft than for story. Ohlin has found an interesting balance between showing and telling. The drama of her scenes carries the story, and a word here, a gesture there illuminate what is not said. Then sometimes in the narrative breaks she gives us a direct description of the character’s feelings.

For years he had occasionally gone out with some divorced woman . . . after which he would let things drop . He became the guy who didn’t call. The guy who met your kid and played catch with him one weekend, then never came around again. It wasn’t heartlessness so much as apathy.

I appreciated the occasional guidepost into what is for me unfamiliar territory. For instance, just when Mitch’s new relationship seems to be deepening the way he wants, he learns something about himself and “(h)e was so disappointed in himself, so ashamed, that he began to crave escape. ” That is why he chose to go to the Arctic. Ohlin’s characters often don’t understand their own motivations, so it feels natural for us to discover the bare statement of them as they do. It’s an effective technique.

There are a number of interesting parallels that subtly tie the story together, such as a patient of Grace’s who loves his dog more than his wife, and Mitch loving his girlfriend’s son more that her. Watching these work out through the story is great fun if you are interested in how a story is put together. The ending is satisfying, something that has become rare, so I treasure it.

I was tagged by the marvelous Sarah Bartlett to participate in this blog hop, so I'll postpone telling you about the satisfying books I've been reading just for this week. A blog hop is where you move from one blog after another to read the entries or to leave comments. This is one way my online writing community stays in touch and has conversations.

I've mentioned this group before and my surprise at what an effective community it has become despite the fact that we've never met in 3D. In addition to blog hops, we have regular twitter chats, several book clubs, and active Facebook pages. Learn more at the Wordsmith Studio website and consider joining us.

Here are my responses to the three questions:

1. What are you working on?

You would have to ask that! I'm giving myself a few weeks to deal with some major life changes before plunging into my long-neglected WIP, a novel, which has received scant attention lately. I'm also busy promoting my new poetry collection, Terrarium. See Upcoming Events on the Home Page for details of readings.

2. How does your writing process work?

I try to concentrate on one thing at a time (stop laughing), at least when working on a long piece like a novel. I do continue to make notes on the other ideas waiting in the wings, so they are more or less worked out when I'm ready to get to them. I like outlines but don't hesitate to revise them as necessary. While writing my memoir, Innocent, I received some great advice, which was to stop rewriting the first chapter and just push on through to the end of the first draft. At that point I knew how to write the first chapter. I love the revision process, though it does make me dig even deeper to understand what the story is really about and ensure that every detail is relevant.

3. Who are authors you most admire?

I admire authors like Margaret Atwood and Arturo Pérez- Reverte who take risks, who try something new. I admire authors like Paul Scott and Timothy Findley who teach me how to use language. I admire authors like Jane Urquhart and Deirdre Madden who show me how to put a novel together. I admire authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Munro who never lose their focus.

Finally, I nominate three bloggers who inspire me: Elissa Field, Morgen Bailey, and Mare Cromwell.

Another remarkable novel from Madden, who is rapidly rising in the ranks of my favorite authors. On this midsummer's day, which happens to be the birthday of the fine and famous actor Molly Fox, our narrator wakes to find herself in Fox's bedroom in Dublin. The two are long-time friends and have swapped homes for a bit while Molly does some work in London and our narrator works on her new play. It has her a bit stymied. She's struggling to find the meaning of the image that has captured her imagination and is the germ of the new play: a man holding a hare. Madden, who has written so perceptively about the artist's process is equally adept at getting to the heart of those in the theatre.

For me, as a playwright, the creation of a character is like listening to something faint and distant. It's like trying to remember someone one knew slightly, in passing, a very long time ago, but to remember them so that one knows them better than one knows oneself. It's like trying to know a family member who died before one was born, from looking at photographs and objects belonging to them; also from hearing the things, often contradictory, that people say about them, the anecdotes told . . . For me, the play is the final destination. For Molly, it is the point of departure. She takes the text, mine or anyone's, and works backwards to discover from what her character says who this person is, so that she can become them.

Questions of identity, of understanding ourselves and those closest to us drive this book, as we go through the day in Dublin. You'd think there'd be a rule against taking on a classic like Ulysses, yet Madden makes me forget I've ever heard of Joyce. She cheerfully breaks another writer's rule: don't start your novel with a dream. She succeeds by getting through the dream quickly, using the awakening as a natural introduction to Molly Fox's world, and having the meaning of the dream be so oblique that it is only when the novel is done that we fully understand it.

I enjoyed this book so much that I didn't even register that it is a continuous narrative, without chapter breaks, and that the first-person narrator remains unnamed. I loved reading about the theatre, but it is the gradual revelation of character that enthralled me. Along with the narrator, we circle deeper and deeper into the past and present of her closest friends, adding nuance and complexity with each slim layer.

One of the strange things about really old friendships is that the past is both important and not important. Taking the quality of the thing as a given—the affection, the trust—the fact that I had known both Molly and Andrew for over twenty years gave my relationships with them more weight and significance than friendships of, say, three or four years' standing. And yet we rarely spoke to each other of the past, of our lives and experiences during that long period of time.

Even on this magical day they say very little, yet much is revealed. Andrew is an art historian who has improbably become a television personality, able to drop his shyness and pedantry in front of the impersonal camera. Molly too protects herself, refusing to answer direct questions, tossing off valuable bits of personal information only in the most offhand manner in an improbably situation. She “communicat(es) something of her deepest self in a way that is only possible for her when she is on stage.” Perhaps we can only reveal ourselves in artificial situations, or perhaps we can only recognise the truth of others when they are taken out of context. I remember seeing Farewell, My Concubine and being unbearably moved by the love story, I who thought myself immunized through boring repetition to love stories. It was only in this—to me—foreign context that the emotion could reach me.

It is not only friends who move through this tale, but family as well, families abandoned or abandoning. The narrator's older brother, Tom, a parish priest, has been the great bulwark of her life, introducing her to the theatre, preserving her self-confidence as she grew into the knowledge that she was the oddball in her family. Molly cares for her damaged brother, Fergus, while Andrew is haunted by his brother, Billy. Seemingly straightforward, these relationships and interrelationships whisper through the story, shedding veils, prompting more questions.

I learned long ago that the roles people choose to play are one way to get at the core of their identity, but I'm still left wondering how well I know anyone. I also still wonder how well people know themselves. In contrast to Molly, Andrew and the narrator, we meet an old school chum the narrator runs into at the shops. As they catch up on the intervening years she thinks, “In that instant she looked like someone who had awoken from a dream, the dream that was her life, and who saw it for the first time for what it was, how far it was from what she had imagined in the past it might become.”

The book bears these weighty themes lightly, being on its surface simply delightful, with lovely descriptions of Fox's garden full of sweet peas and climbing roses, raspberries and blackberries, and an unlikely life-size black-and-white cow made of fiberglass. There is also plenty of gentle humor in, for example, the number of people who turn up at the front door to wish Fox a happy birthday and try to hide their dismay at finding our narrator instead. I highly recommend that you spend a midsummer day with Deirdre Madden, while I hare off to find more of her novels.