Novelist Robert Sedlack’s poignant second novel, The Horn of a Lamb, takes place a long way from the setting of his acclaimed 2001 debut, The African Safari Papers. This time Sedlack introduces the reader to rural Manitoba and the life of Fred Pickle, a former junior hockey phenom now brain injured after a fall during an after-hours pick-up game.

But is that really how things unfolded that tragic night almost 20 years ago? As a result of his injury, Pickle’s faulty memory makes him a sometimes unreliable narrator. Pickle lives with his kind but on-edge, ex-cop uncle Jack on a sheep farm, where the two try not to drive each other crazy. The two loves of Pickle’s life are his local NHL team and the creation each winter of his backyard hockey rink. When the owner decides to move the team – a team not unlike the NHL’s old Winnipeg Jets, whose owner sold them to Phoenix following the 1995-96 season – Badger, a lawyer and friend of Jack’s and an old-school Marxist revolutionary, enlists Pickle in a scheme to teach the money men a lesson.

Much of the action takes place on or around the sheep farm, where Pickle learns the fragility of life from the birth cycle of the animals. Sedlack’s sense of boundaries – fences to keep sheep in and neighbouring pit bulls out – give the novel a bracing tautness and tension. The sense of frontier prairie violence and accidental catastrophe around every corner sustains the reader. In the city, one can avoid the gaze of one’s fellow human beings simply by looking the other way. In the country, and in this occasionally melancholy but quintessentially Canadian novel, one says hello to one’s neighbours, keeps a gun in the house, and resolves things with clarity and purpose – come what may.

One complaint – and it’s a small one – is that Pickle, depending on Sedlack’s storytelling needs of the moment, seems to have either been given uncommon wisdom, insight, and humour as a result of his injury or been struck with utter naiveté and memory loss. Readers are never quite sure which Pickle will show up.