In The Two-Headed Calf, Sandra Birdsell’s first collection of stories in 12 years, the Manitoban writer explores the strangeness lurking in Winnipeg’s tidy streets. Here, parents and children, lovers, and friends live in conflict, sometimes resolved, sometimes not.

The book begins with a pair of stories about Lorraine and her turbulent daughter. In the first, Lorraine travels back to Winnipeg after a move to Vancouver, musing about her daughter’s passion for saving waifs and strays. The second is the story told from the adolescent daughter’s point of view. In both narratives, the war between careful parent and wild child ends in peace.

In another mother-daughter story, “A Necessary Treason,” Birdsell evokes the hidden symmetry of generations in luminous prose. Here, the Russian-born Sadie has an uneasy meeting with her middle-aged daughter and her daughter’s lover. Her daughter is unaware that Sadie’s memories of a rebellious past suffuse the present, and equally unaware that her own daring nature is inherited from her mother.

Shifting from reveries in a Winnipeg garden in “A Necessary Treason,” Birdsell evokes colder feelings. In “Phantom Limbs,” an intricate story of betrayal, Birdsell shows her gift for poetic narrative. A winter landscape becomes “skin…the snow opaque, pebbled, with its milky sheen.” A woman bends to discover “long silvery spikes of ice crystals” underneath the snow, which “clink together as she riffles through them. The entire snow pack was made of shards of ice, crystal teeth that she plucked out…and sent skeetering, brilliant against the frozen river.”

Inevitably, families veer into complete chaos. The final three tales, although they vary in plot, share a nightmarish, positively creepy quality. Lives remain in disarray and Birdsell leaves the reader longing for the sanctuary of a Winnipeg garden. In “The Man from Mars,” for example, a destitute Mennonite family returns to Canada from Mexico. The father can do nothing right. “And then Willie did us a favour,” his daughter recalls. He got himself killed. Only as a grown woman does Willie’s daughter understand that her “Martian” father was weighted down by forces he couldn’t combat.

It is the powerful title story, however, that best describes the battle between wildness and conformity Birdsell explores throughout the book. It concerns Sylvia – the illegitimate daughter of Betty – their Mennonite relatives, and their Metis friend Louise. Weaving the fates of these Manitobans together, Birdsell delivers a satisfaction and clarity rarely seen in fiction, or in life.