There’s a distinctly Eastern European feel to Toronto writer Natalee Caple’s debut novel, The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World. That the characters in this intimate story of love’s compromises and life’s disappointments have names like Josef, Nadja, Irma, Ivo, and Adora adds to this impression. But it is the book’s pervading melancholy, Weltschmerz perhaps, a sense of life as tragedy leavened by occasional joy, imperfect love, and blind chance, that most strongly suggests this connection.

The novel tells the story of 17-year-old Irma and her sister Nadja, who is almost 16. Working in their parents’ bakery, which is attached to their home, their lives change suddenly when Josef, a 36-year-old widower and father, walks in and proceeds to charm and seduce Irma and captivate Nadja.

Little is ordinary about the world Caple creates, or the clutch of characters that vividly inhabit it. Tragedy more than happiness defines their lives. The girls’ father Ivo, a painter, never leaves the house, and keeps painting over his only canvas after each new start; their maternal grandmother, 62, takes up with her 26- year-old house painter; and young Nadja secretly rents an apartment that she sneaks off to for scant hours just to be alone and read.

The strengths Caple showed in her first book, a short story collection, The Heart is its Own Reason (1998), are expanded here. Her characters are as deeply odd, imperfect, yet sympathetically human as any of those found in Barbara Gowdy’s short stories, and her knack for working hooks and twists into the tale – as with the opening sentence, which is only explained at book’s end – is balanced by a calm, crisp, Raymond Carveresque style that furthers the lure of her dreamlike, resonant world.