Stories from the Woman from Away is a pull-no-punches look at life on Cape Breton Island in the recent past. The eponymous heroine is Mary, an American married to Jim Douglas of the “Glen,” where Gaelic remains the language of greeting, and moonshine liquor makes farming life a little easier.

Gillis sets herself a challenge by getting the worst over first. We meet Mary as she is dying. Her circumstances appear poverty-stricken and pathetic: only 45, her children are not yet grown, her husband taciturn. Then, like peeling open an envelope stocked with yellowing photographs, Gillis reveals the secret, living history of this outsider through her memories.

The novel becomes a journey into the heart of farming life, a hardscrabble paradise. Gillis is very good at describing the nuts and bolts of Mary’s married life.

The quiet symbolism and quasi-religious mood are entirely fitting. Mary notices her husband’s family still says grace before meals – after all this is a kind of Eden – but they are also breezily ironic about their faith. “The Promised Land” is the local name for a disputed forest tract where a major liquor still is hidden. Mary never gets closer to the heart of her world than the day she is shown where the secret moonshine is made.

Like the reticent people Mary meets, Gillis’s writing is plain yet mysterious, mundane yet profound. We would like to know more about Mary – certainly we would wish her a better exit; still, we bask in the moments of pure sparkling happiness she experienced in her Cape Breton Glen.