Every once in a while, an author effects a haunting. She creates a place, a time, a mood that endures past the “real time” required to read her work. In her new novel, The Green Library, Janice Kulyk Keefer has managed such magic.

For just such occasions, reviewers maintain a treasure trove of adjectives: the prose, they say, is luminous, transcendent, poignant. And, indeed, Kulyk Keefer’s novel is all these things at various points in its unfolding. But long after the last page has rustled closed, The Green Library’s seamless sense of history and pain suffuses the reader’s consciousness. And therein lies the novel’s true power.

Set in Toronto and Kiev, traversing 52 years, from 1941 to 1993, the novel tells the story of Eva Chown’s quest for identity and understanding. Divorced, with an 11-year-old son named Ben, Eva shares her home with a travel agent named Dan Yashinsky and his daughter Julie. Not quite inhabiting quiet desperation, Eva seems nullified of all emotion, or, as Dan puts it, sleeping with her eyes open most of the time.

One day, she comes home from her job as a day-care worker to find a stark white envelope lying on her hall floor. Inside is a crudely severed photograph of a woman and a young boy, apparently taken some time in the 1930s. Cut from the photo is a person – apparently a man – whose hands rest upon the woman’s shoulders.

Who are the woman and the boy in the photograph? Who is missing, and why? It becomes imperative that Eva solve the mystery – and lay some unquiet part of her soul to rest.

Eva’s sleuthing takes her back in time – to childhood memories of the cleaning lady (a “Dee Pee” or Displaced Person) who worked for her wealthy parents, of her engineer father’s cabin in the woods at Porcupine Creek, of the mysterious “Bohunk” who briefly occupied her beautiful mother’s life – and across the ocean, to Ukraine, to find out what happened to the cleaning lady’s son, Alex Moroz, whom Eva once loved and who holds a powerful key to her past. Alex has become a Displaced Person in his own homeland, embittered by his own lack of future, impotent as his daughter blooms with cancer in the wake of Chernobyl.

Confronted with a personal history she never knew she had, with a country about which she is pitifully ignorant, Eva discovers her connection to a murdered poet who was her grandmother, struggles with the intricate politics of Ukraine, and faces the potency of the infamous killing ground at Babi Yar. Back in Canada, she finally meets her mother’s long-lost lover, the former independence leader who is her natural father. In learning she is not who or what she thought she was, Eva inherits the full meaning of pain and awareness such human understanding brings. In Kulyk Keefer’s hands, Eva’s journey to selfhood symbolizes the untold and repudiated stories of all those Displaced Persons – especially those from Ukraine – who came to Canada after the Second World War, wrenched by leaving loved ones, graveyards, and identities far behind. The Green Library is a wonderfully crafted novel of forgetting and remembrance.