What Is Left the Daughter

Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books -- The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L -- in this erotically charged and morally complex story.

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.

Setting in motion the novel's chain of life-altering passions, and the wartime perfidy at its core, is the arrival of German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents -- including a German U-boat's sinking of the Nova Scotia -- Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling -- lend intense narrative power to Norman's uncannily layered story.