Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this countrys finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major booksThe Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of Lin this erotically charged and morally complex story. Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridgesthe result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda. Setting in motion the novels chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidentsincluding a German U-boats sinking of the Nova ScotiaNewfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be travelinglend intense narrative power to Normans uncannily layered story. Wyatts account of the astonishingnot least to him events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. Its a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one. An utterly stirring novel.

This is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.