Toronto writer and playwright Jeffrey Round’s fourth book, The Honey Locust, begins in medias res, with seasoned photojournalist Angela Thomas dodging bullets to escape the wartorn Bosnian village in which she is trapped. Her partner of a few months, videographer André Riel, was seriously injured in an explosion and has been medevacked out. The novel’s tone is set when Angela observes, “It’s impossible to imagine life amid the ruins, but it’s here.”

Round’s scenes shift in cinematic fashion between Bosnia, where “[t]hey’re not repeating history – they’re erasing it,” and the Thomas cottage on the Bruce Peninsula during a late-summer gathering. The flashbacks to Ontario depict Angela in a place where family is “a war of its own,” and self-worth and happiness are elusive. Her dying father is loving and kind, but he is unable to ease the tension that pervades Angela’s relationship with her unaffectionate mother, or the turmoil of her two younger sisters’ lives. “It was the story of half the Western world,” Angela thinks. “Where else would people purposely and systematically turn good fortune into bad because it wasn’t exactly what they wanted?”

Angela’s assignments abroad allow her to escape from her family, her inherent restlessness, and the childless marriage she no longer wants. Behind the lens of her camera, amid the chaos of a war zone, she can keep the world at bay, while still believing she might make a difference. “Photography helped her to decipher the captured moment and to uncover what lay beneath it – the invisible worlds buried under the routes of history.”

Initially, Round employs sparse dialogue and sequesters the reader behind Angela’s “internal lens,” which offers up facts and observations as if flipping through photos. This barrier begins to dissolve when Angela and André, trapped by shelling, share family stories with each other. Slowly, the reader is allowed to engage with other characters who are well-rounded, largely sympathetic, and trying to salvage some measure of hope from their trials. Round’s prose style, though not flashy, is seamless and accomplished.

The Honey Locust is a well-written exploration of conflict in all its forms. For some, Round suggests, life’s conflicts can be survived. Regardless, they are as inescapable as history itself. – Ingrid Ruthig, a writer and editor living near Toronto.