A Map of Glass

Jerome is a young earth-artist spending a few months on an island in Lake Ontario. His idyll is shattered when he stumbles across a man frozen in the ice near the shore. A year later, Sylvia, a middle aged woman, shows up at his studio in Toronto. She was the lover of the dead man. Andrew's ice-encased body has haunted Jerome's dreams; Sylvia has never recovered from losing the only man she has ever loved. And now before she forgets, before the past slips irretrievably through her fingers, Sylvia wants to recount her story to the stranger who found Andrew. It is a story that stretches long and wide, beginning with Sylvia's childhood and mysterious illness; her barren marriage to a doctor obsessed by the illness and then her chance encounter with the historical geographer Andrew Woodman: their shared passion for the land and its history, the beginnings of desire, the stories he tells her of his ancestors. In the end, his own tragic illness is revealed, an illness that finally separates them. Tender, elegiac and beautifully written, "Map of Glass" is a deeply romantic and moving novel about the fragility of love and memory, and the redemptive power of stories.