The Wrong Madonna, Regina writer Britt Holmstrom’s second English-language novel, begins in a deserted churchyard in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in the spring of 1965. “In this city, where the image of Madonna and Child cropped up everywhere,” Lisa Grankvist clutches to her breast a tiny infant whom she dares not call by name. The story ends some 35 years later with Grankvist returning to her girlhood home in Sweden, finally reconciled with her past. In between, the reader witnesses three decades of recent history – from swinging London in the 1960s to the war-torn Balkans – through Grankvist’s unique and all-too-fallible perspective.

Holmstrom vividly evokes scene and character with a minimum of flourish. Settings as disparate as London’s Carnaby Street era and the 1970s in suburban Canada are presented both realistically, with a keen eye for detail, and emotionally, with a character-based resonance that serves to re-imagine the settings at a level beyond the merely physical.

Grankvist’s experience of these places, touched by guilt and informed by both a childhood dream of escape to a private island and an early experience of Bosch’s triptych “The Last Judgement,” is strong, heady stuff. From the reader’s first experience of Grankvist as a troubled adolescent on the run (although it is unclear from what) through an adulthood of guilt and compromise, she emerges as a vivid and compelling literary creation.

The central narrative strand – the mystery of the nameless infant – is not as successfully executed. The mystery is often played out in an overly stagey and heavy-handed manner, at times feeling like a literary device upon which to hang the novel’s expansive themes and settings.