"A Town Called Solace" by Mary Lawson

This is quite light, but accomplished and nicely-written. It is a novel set in Northern Ontario principally in the early 1970s. There are essentially two stories that intermingle somewhat. One concerns the family of a teenage girl who runs away from home, thus creating a great deal of stress and a police investigation. The other concerns their next-door neighbour, an elderly lay and why she has left her house and all her money to an apparent stranger who no-one in the town knows anything about. As each narrative evolves and is settled, we learn about the central characters and this small quite isolated community they live in. An original aspect is that one of the three characters through whose eyes the story is told is an eight year old girl who finds everything baffling because adults do not tell her exactly what is going on.

The book is well-constructed, authentically plotted and (on the whole) amiably peopled. Not a first rank novel, despite the Booker Prize nomination, but one I am pleased to have read.