Moon Road Author : Sarah Leipciger ISBN-13 : 978085752654 Publisher : Doubleday Guideline Price : £16.99 Kathleen’s daughter, Una, disappeared without trace 19 years before the novel begins. Kathleen has never given up hope of finding her.
The narrative opens when bones, which may be Una’s, are discovered near where she went missing, on Vancouver Island. Una’s father, Yannick, from whom Kathleen has been long divorced, appears and asks her to drive with him across Canada to do a DNA test. She reluctantly agrees.
So the novel, the tension of which is created by the question mark over the bones, and everyone’s desire to find out what happened to Una, is a road novel. Most of it is set in Yannick’s pickup truck as he and Kathleen drive from Ontario to Vancouver (a journey which I have often made by train, in the stories of Alice Munro). Kathleen is tough and independent, working hard at her flower garden business, given to strong language.
Her grief at the loss of her daughter is well traced, and the emotional lives of the characters are explored with sensitivity and insight. This is a kind novel; one senses the author’s compassion for all the main players – it is mainly told from Kathleen’s point of view, but from time to time we switch to Yannick’s, and there are flashbacks to Una’s (meaning that we, the readers, know things that are not known to either Kathleen or Yannick). You don’t appreciate how big the ocean is, or how indifferent, until you’re se.
