Until her nomination for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, Carol Windley was perennially under-known, though her stories have appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories, and her first collection, Visible Light, was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award in 1993. With Home Schooling, she has been discovered yet again, and this time it’s going to stick.

Set on the West Coast (mainly on Vancouver Island, where Windley lives), the eight stories in this collection are confident and unsettling. Windley seamlessly juxtaposes disparate elements – remembered phrases, telling verbal exchanges and incidents – to move her plots hypnotically forward. Invariably they have at their heart some terrible, life-altering event: the sudden death of a child, the loss of a spouse, the defection of a parent. In “What Saffi Knows,” a woman recalls the unsolved disappearances of two boys when she was a very young child, and reveals what she has lived with all her life, the knowledge that the killer lived next door. But was it true or only a “made-up story”?

Windley leaves some elements of her narratives disturbingly unresolved, but the gaps and absences are what make the stories so compelling. The lessons in Home Schooling are often hard ones, but the stories are not grim or angst-ridden. Instead, they are taut, wry, and wise, and never without a little hope.