Toronto readers shouldn’t take umbrage that their city serves as Saskatoon writer Barbara Sapergia’s metaphor for spiritual paralysis: even back home on the Prairies, her central characters were unhappy. But it is in Toronto’s Cabbagetown that Sapergia has her protagonist Annie Ransome flounder, typing doctoral theses in quiet desperation while her ambitious husband pursues his television career. By the time her aunt calls from Saskatoon with terrible news of her mother’s suicide, Annie has barely the emotional energy to grieve. She does make it home to Riverbend for the funeral, for which we can be grateful: Sapergia’s depiction of this excruciatingly dysfunctional
ritual with its matrix of unresolved community tensions is hard to beat.

The focus shifts to healing as Annie’s return to her western roots continues. All at once she has a house, neighbours, job, lover. Though none of them seem quite real, they act like a balm for her parched soul, the equivalent of the goats’ milk and alpine air that revived poor Clara in Heidi. Meanwhile Sapergia unravels the central mystery that has blighted the lives of four generations in her family. Old letters Annie discovers in the family home tell a tale-within-a-tale of her great-grandfather’s lengthy confinement in a tuberculosis sanatorium. This foray into the disease’s obscure history in this country is fascinating, but as a plot device it is not entirely convincing. The story also goes on a little too long; when Annie’s husband turns up to cover a catastrophic flood, we’re pretty sure how things are going to turn out. But the writing is smart and readable, full of wry, sardonic vignettes (an ignominious failure with grilled radicchio, for example), sometimes even mesmerizing. Sapergia’s considerable skills as a dramatist – she is an established playwright as well as a novelist and short-story writer – inform every scrap of dialogue and every scene.