Joan Barfoot’s 10th novel, like her ninth, Critical Injuries, begins with a cataclysmic event: in this case, the death of a husband. The death happens without warning. Philip Lawrence, a hale and hearty master wood craftsman who’s just 46, dies in his sleep. Nora, his widow, is convinced the town thinks the cause is orgiastic excess. Rumours about the household are rife: one man living with three women – the artist Nora, their employee Sophie, and Nora’s live-in model, Beth.

Barfoot follows the shock waves from the moment of discovery of death to the ripples widening over a period of a year. She explores the uneasy interface between cosmopolitan culture and small-town Ontario parochialism. Slipping easily from one character’s consciousness to another, she fills in the backstories of the three women. Both Sophie and Beth are the walking wounded – Sophie through horrors experienced during a stint as an aid worker, Beth through being raised as her mother’s little beauty queen. Luck tells us we are all at the mercy of chance: no life is safe from pain, but by the same token, none is beyond recovery.

With a reputation firmly established since 1978 by her award-winning first novel, Abra, Barfoot now wears fiction like a glove. Here, as in much of her fiction, the tension lies between secrets revealed and unrevealed. Philip and Sophie’s affair turns out to be news to no one; it is the spacey Beth who holds the wild cards. Luck is by turns sad, scary, quirky, and moving. It provides moments of high comedy, as when Philip’s bitter ex-wife gives a paint-stripping speech at his funeral. The conclusion – the opening of Nora’s show, its subject (and material, literally) Philip – is near-Shakespearean, reuniting the household in a profoundly re-made form. Just off-kilter enough to save the ending from being pat, the scene is a fitting end to a deeply enjoyable novel.