<P>Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books—<I>The Bird Artist</I>, <I>The Museum Guard</I>, and <I>The Haunting of L</I>—in this erotically charged and morally complex story.</p> <p>Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges—the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda.</p> <p>Setting in motion the novel's chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents—including a German U-boat's sinking of the Nova Scotia–Newfoundland ferry <I>Caribou</I>, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling—lend intense narrative power to Norman's uncannily layered story. <p>Wyatt's account of the astonishing—not least to him— events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. It's a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one. <p>An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.