The Winter Vault
by Anne Michaels
McClelland & Stewart
HK$195
Poet-turned-novelist Anne Michaels' latest work, The Winter Vault, comes more than a decade after the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces, and it arrives with just the kind of emotional conflict, historical inspiration and poetic language that propelled her debut.
The Winter Vault follows a couple, Jean and Avery, as their young marriage frays after the appearance of a still-born daughter. The novel begins in 1964, in Egypt, as engineer Avery works on a project to move and rebuild the renowned temple at Abu Simbel to make way for the Aswan Dam. Michaels moves the novel through the Egyptian desert, eastern Europe and a small Canadian town. The people who inhabit them all seem to carry a sense of loss nearly impossible to shake: that of a loved one, or a home along a river, sometimes both.