Like many Canadian writers, Mary Lawson casts her glance backward, telling historical stories of rural life that dwell almost as much on snowy landscapes as the complex characters who inhabit them. There is great tragedy and sadness, hardship and loss, and yet what sets Lawson apart is storytelling so matter-of-fact (in the best possible way) that readers are able to feel the emotional intensity of the characters’ situations without succumbing to moroseness. There is no drudgery, even when Lawson is describing the literal drudgery of running a farm or tending house.

Admirers of Lawson’s previous novels will not be disappointed with the author’s latest effort. The same easy grace and economy of language that drew readers into those earlier stories are employed to full effect, and the setting, along with the welcome reappearance of a few familiar characters, imparts a sense of homecoming. Spanning 1966 to ’69, the action of Road Ends is once again set in and around the fictional Northern Ontario town of Struan, which Lawson integrates so fundamentally into her tale that it ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes another character altogether.

The novel’s focus shifts between three members of the Cartwright family: patriarch Edward, eldest son Tom, and daughter Megan. Each is dealing with a crisis of sorts, and the way in which Lawson weaves together their individual stories is both complex and satisfying. Megan has spent most of her life tending to her six brothers and running the household while her mother retreated to her bedroom with each new baby. At 21, she decides she’s had enough and takes off to England, where she makes a quiet new life for herself as a hotel manager in London.

Tom, meanwhile, returns home from Toronto, where he was completing his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. Stricken by his best friend’s suicide a year earlier, Tom has withdrawn from the world, opting to drive the town’s snowplow – a job that affords minimal human contact – rather than accepting overtures of employment from Boeing and de Havilland.

Megan’s and Tom’s chapters are told in the third person, while Edward’s first-person sections read much like a diary. It’s an interesting and appropriate choice on Lawson’s part, allowing her to inject the younger characters’ worlds with broader context. We see London at the end of the 1960s not just from Megan’s perspective, but complete with timely details that foster a greater sense of the era. This approach also allows us to note how frozen in time Struan really is, even as Tom ponders his attraction to the developing field of aerospace technology – an industry of the future if ever there was one.

Megan and Tom are complete, interesting characters, but Edward is the most engaging. His narrative, which involves delving into his mother’s diaries and struggling with memories of his abusive father, feels most intimate. Through him, Lawson extrapolates themes of family and the way our past shapes who we are. Edward has very little to do with his children, whom he repeatedly states he didn’t want in the first place. He is as absent as possible while still residing in the same house, spending his time at work or holed up in his study with books that transport him to far-flung locations.

Escape is what all the novel’s characters seem to be seeking. Megan’s twin brothers enlist in the navy; her mother – who, at 45, is obviously suffering from more than mere distraction following the birth of her latest son – escapes first into the bubble of her bedroom, then slowly into dementia. Only Tom seems not to be escaping so much as hiding.

Edward and Tom’s stories are integral to Lawson’s narrative, but Road Ends is really Megan’s book. She is the centre of the family, and – as her father and brother note frequently – her absence is what allows everything to fall apart. She is immensely sympathetic; put upon by her dysfunctional family for far too long, her ability to take charge of a situation and not suffer fools borders on the heroic.

After feeling unmoored and, in the months following her move to London, unsure of herself possibly for the first time in her life, Megan dismisses the advances of a man at a party. “And all at once Megan felt just fine,” writes Lawson. “[H]e was an idiot…. Megan knew where she was with idiots; she’d been dealing with them all her life.” The reader is apt to cheer.

By the time Lawson ties her three protagonists’ stories tightly together at the end of the novel, we have come to know them for their distinct voices and personalities, and are relieved by the subtle hints the author has dropped along the way to indicate a more hopeful future. Redemption appears in many guises, and these characters, despite their flaws, feel greatly deserving of any that comes their way.