It’s an informal genre but a recognizable one: the novel of a second coming rather than a coming of age, of a still-young woman forced to begin again after the failure of a marriage spanning most of her adult years. Elisabeth Harvor’s debut novel employs a quest for wellness, pursued through the strange jungles of alternative medicine, as a central metaphor for rebuilding a life.

Her protagonist, Claire Vornoff, tries and rejects reflexologists and naturopaths like prospective lovers before falling hard for a body therapist named Declan Farrell. In an era of knee-jerk zero tolerance for “unprofessionalism” in relationships between patients and practitioners, Harvor handles their developing intimacy with subtlety and sympathy. Claire is struggling to find her way, but her gifted healer, it seems, is in even murkier territory.

Claire is closely related to the edgy women in Harvor’s acclaimed short stories, but the novel form gives us time to grow close to her. Her obsessive intensity is utterly believable and mesmerizing, and her anxiously heightened awareness animates a world of sensual immediacy. As she drives through the countryside, anticipating or processing encounters with Declan, the sunstruck summer fields throb with life; in Ottawa, a spooky vision of skaters and dogs disturbs the night. Smells, sights, and sounds are acute, taste less so (understandable in a devotee of tofu and camomile tea). The most baffling sense is that of touch, which Claire is so explosively exploring.

Intricately textured with surreal juxtapositions and small encounters, fragile humour and fear, Excessive Joy extends Harvor’s distinguished career as a short-story writer and poet. This is really wonderful writing – polished, well plotted, affecting and unsettling. Its thoroughly domestic territory may not attract readers in search of more exotic elements – conflicts of race and culture, extreme geography, elephants – but those who like this sort of thing, Harvor’s considerable following among them, will embrace it.