The day of the title is June 14 (two days before Bloomsday, as it happens), 1953. But through memory, family stories, a snatch of song, even a single word – “Ja” – Sandra Birdsell expands her frame, ranging from the first time Oliver Vandal and Sara Vogt lay eyes on each other to their first urgent lovemaking to the darker pasts both carry with them.

In this rich, engrossing novel, Birdsell’s seventh, the Manitoba-born author encapsulates a whole social history in one patched-together house in a dwindling town a short bus ride from Winnipeg. She interleaves tragic secrets from the old country with the largely obliterated history of the displaced Cree. But just as impressive are her skills in characterization. At first meeting neither the abrasive Sara nor the evasive Oliver is likable – Sara is retching upstairs (pregnant again?), Oliver has just fired his rifle into the doorstep – but the couple springs at once to life. Oliver is Métis, Sara is Mennonite (the younger sister of Katy in Birdsell’s previous novel, The Russländer), and the tensions, personal and racial, in their 20-year marriage have never been resolved.

Their union has been fertile, however. There are 10 Vandal children, and Birdsell manages to gives solid, corporeal weight to each one, from Alvina, the overburdened eldest, down to the baby. She makes equally real and vivid a wider community of family and inlaws, neighbours and employers – Métis, Mennonite, French, and English.

The book feels shorter than its 400 pages. The reader is drawn on by sheer pleasure in the writing and an increasing connectedness to the Vandals. Birdsell makes us acutely conscious of their terrible vulnerability: to the open cistern, the slick American boy with his big car, broken necks, suffocation, adultery, destitution. We must know what happens to these people. By the end, with all the major players gathered together in an extraordinary tragicomic climax, this reader for one was shouting from the sidelines.