Don Hannah’s first novel The Wise and Foolish Virgins is one of this year’s selections in Knopf Canada’s “New Face of Fiction” series. Knopf’s annual spring campaign to uncover the next CanLit rising star has had its share of hits – most notably Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees – and misses. The gap between what is actually a fresh “new face” and what a publishing house is marketing as a “new face” can be an awfully wide one. Which is why it can be fun (though admittedly a little cynical) to speculate on what the powers-that-be at a big publishing house are betting on when it comes to a first novel. My guess is that with The Wise and Foolish Virgins they’re betting they’ve found another Fall on Your Knees.

There are similarities: Hannah, like MacDonald, is an award-winning playwright. He was born and raised in the Maritimes, Shediac, New Brunswick (MacDonald is from Cape Breton), and he has set his story in a small New Brunswick town. There’s also a Peyton Place quality to the tale: a preoccupation with the intimate secrets – everything from AIDS to incest to teenage pregnancy – that haunt the lives of ordinary people. But perhaps the most important similarity of all is that The Wise and Foolish Virgins, like Fall on Your Knees, is the real thing, a finely crafted, genuinely moving novel that does, indeed, introduce a writer with an original and engaging voice.

The one problem with the novel is that that’s not obvious right away. Hannah’s story takes a little too long to get going. There are a lot of characters to introduce, and a lot of histories to keep track of, like Sandy Whyte, the town’s upright and uptight bachelor, who’s spent his life denying his true nature. Or Margaret Saunders, who had a brief, unconsummated relationship with Sandy and has spent her life trying to free herself of a devastating childhood secret. Meanwhile, Gloria Maurice, Sandy’s housekeeper, is planning a family reunion with one brother fresh out of jail for breaking and entering, another crippled physically and emotionally by the loss of his arm, and another, Raymond, who’s dying and returning home with his gay lover.

There’s a lot more than this to keep track of, but once it becomes clear that all these separate lives with all their carefully guarded secrets are going to intersect, The Wise and Foolish Virgins gathers momentum. It also gathers emotional power. Ordinary, everyday unhappiness and disappointment is a difficult subject to write about and, to his credit, Hannah writes about it assuredly. All the characters in The Wise and Foolish Virgins are misfits in one way or another, and in the hands of a novelist with less compassion, they’d be easy to mock, easy to dismiss and turn into clichés. Instead, Hannah shows us that even the most unrequited life has value and possibility. He makes us care about his lonely characters and care as much as they do about the smallest, simplest pleasures: from a solitary stolen kiss to a drive in the country. The Wise and Foolish Virgins is an impressive debut.