Frances Itani is a marvellous short story writer. Her collections Poached Egg on Toast and Leaning, Leaning over Water are absolutely first-rate. Her new novel, Remembering the Bones, starts with the same sense of vivid detail and engaging scene-setting found in her stories. Ontarian Georgina Danforth Witley is one of 99 citizens of the Commonwealth born the same day as Queen Elizabeth II and invited by the monarch to celebrate their common 80th birthdays together. Excited and a little distracted, Witley drives out to the airport early on a mid-April morning.

She doesn’t make the flight, and it is here – after a masterful description of Witley losing control of her car and somersaulting into a ravine – that the novel changes direction. Instead of a story about a celebration that caps a life, Itani gives us Witley’s disordered thoughts as she tries to inch her way up the ravine to safety. Witley knows some bones are broken; she finds herself remembering Gray’s Anatomy (the book, not the television series), and her musings on her life, her loves, and her heritage take on an anatomical cast.

Witley’s memories are not especially remarkable. Indeed, near the end of the book she laments that she seems not to have done much more than be a wife and mother. Itani, I think, wants us to realize the importance of this kind of life, which is just as valuable in its way as that of the strong women in Witley’s family – her grandmother, in particular – and that of the Queen.

Readers who liked Itani’s prize-winning 2003 novel, Deafening, will find many of the same themes here: courage in the face of physical adversity, the faraway horror of war, and the problems of understanding that arise in the most solid of marriages.  But even the suspense involved in wondering if Witley will be rescued will not be enough to keep readers compulsively turning pages.