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A haunting, undulating look at the ebbs and flows of love, of aging, of loss – of ordinary life, made extraordinary, then settling back (over time, and pain, and anger and grief) into what is, after all, a life-story maybe live-able after all.

Kathleen, one of our two main protagonists, is, by the reckoning of her from friends, somewhat of an “asshole”. At sixty-five years old, Kathleen has survived, just barely, the loss of her twenty-ish daughter, Una, who disappeared in remote British Columbia more than twenty years ago. Laced with insurmountable grief that rears its ugly head often as bitterness and anger, Kathleen can be unpleasant, caustic, and aggressive to literally everyone in her path, including her closest friends and her ex-husband, Yannick, who as Una’s father, is suffering every bit as equally.

Yannick, seventy-three years old, is by all accounts, a gentle man, with echoes of a thread of violence and rage within that has been worked out of his system fifty-years ago. Divorced many times (beginning with Kathleen, his first wife) Yannick’s quest for love and solace has, if anything, intensified since the loss of his eldest daughter.

As Yannick and Kathleen, in the present day, travel to BC to witness a possible lead on Una’s case, their backstories, and their very complicated feelings for each other, slowly unpeel, taking the reader on a winding, meandering journey, captured in each of their voices, across a lifetime of timelines.

Heartbreakingly thick with the emotional remnants of what could best be described as the radiating infection of their loss, Yannick and Kathleen’s story (both in the past, and including the present day) is affecting, immersive, and brilliantly told.

A lovely poignant read, graceful in its handling of terrible events, and the characters forever stained by its traces.

A great big thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.