Nicola, a sixty-five-year old Australian bohemian who is in a terminal stage of cancer, comes to stay with her old friend Helen, a writer (the author?), while she undergoes an alternative treatment. Garner's stark style is a pastiche of vivid details-- sometimes poetry, sometimes farce--that seem random at first, but gradually flesh out a portrait of two women inhabiting the same strange landscape in very different states of pain. It's as though the reader is watching an impressionist, stroke by stroke, build up a masterpiece, which this is.

The novel bluntly presses the question: How much 'space' do we owe the demands of the dying? Even when the patient is beloved? Or beyond reason? Are we required at all costs to nurse hope?

Garner's answer here isn't simple, either in her lean plot or in its larger resonances. Any reader who has lived Helen's dilemma, as I have (and as most mortals, at some point) will appreciate her honesty in tackling one of life's ugly-let's-ignore-it, transforming realities. Part of the honesty is her refusal to be consistently funny or tragic. Her art is to work a gamut of rowdy emotions into a convincing wholeness, provoking thought about how we should care for others and ourselves. And I'll be thinking through this book for a long time.

This is a genre we don't see often in our times of dangerous and difficult travel: a picaresque novel, set in an almost mythological New England past, with a ragtag band of characters for whom a journey is just as difficult. Like all such journeys this is really about finding home by creating a family and finding oneself. With all that great stuff going on, let me add this is first and foremost hilarious! Scene after scene gives us brilliant images and unexpected events through the eyes of a gently ironic, soul-hungry young boy, Ren, just "adopted" from an orphanage all too glad to be done with him, and not too particular about who claims him. To say more will spoil your fun. If I had five thumbs instead of just two,they'd all be up!