The narrative sings with tension as events move toward the murder, yet it sparkles with antic humor. Two irresistible sexual attractions have propelled the 20-year-old Fabian to his desperate act: his love for spirited, eccentric Margaret Handle, which his parents have sought to thwart because she is an alcoholic and older than he and his mother's flagrant, unrepentant adultery with August as soon as her husband sets off on a long bird-hunting expedition, the proceeds of which are planned to finance Fabian's arranged marriage with a distant cousin he has never met. In a spare but elegant narrative, Fabian Bass tells us on the novel's first page that he is a bird artist, and that he murdered the lighthouse keeper Botho August. This tale of passion, murder and fate is set in 1911 in Witless Bay, Newfoundland, a bleak and isolated community whose citizens are capable of grim retribution and astonishing acts of compassion. It's as though Norman has accepted a challenge to wring beauty out of stone and eloquence out of simplicity. There is a wonderful inverse relationship between a setting where life is reduced to essentials and people are unsophisticated and stoic, and the exotic aura his fiction radiates. Northern landscapes are definitely writer Norman's territory in Northern Lights and now in this enchanting second novel, he simultaneously evokes the region's harsh weather and terrain and invests it with magical possibilities.

The Haunting of L by Howard Norman