'What Is Left the Daughter': Howard Norman's gentle stories of a Nova Scotia town

Howard Norman's gently quirky novel "What Is Left the Daughter" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 243 pp., $25) irresistibly unfolds in circles — as if, like the ripples from a penny tossed into a wishing well, it never really begins or ends. Minor characters disappear and reappear, never lost; people come and go and yet return to the same place, a Nova Scotia town with more than its share of stories. The novel unfolds as a long letter from a father, Wyatt Hillyer, to his now-grown daughter Marlais, whom he has not seen since she was tiny. He tells her a story, summed up in three sentences: "Your mother was the love of my life. I was not the love of hers. You became the love of both of ours."

Wyatt's life, we learn from the meandering letter, has been an eventful one. A teenager growing up in Halifax during World War II, he was orphaned when both of his parents committed suicide for the love of the same woman, a switchboard operator who was nonetheless "as lovely and mysterious as any woman you'd see in an advertisement for perfume in the Saturday Evening Post." Moving to a town with the hopeful name of Middle Economy (it isn't) to live with his aunt and uncle, he falls in love with his alluring cousin Tilda — who only has eyes for a visiting German student.

Though the story is large — murder, passion and a love child, set against the backdrop of a simmering war whose violence sometimes hits close to home — the joy of "What Is Left the Daughter" is in its small, offbeat details that breathe color into its setting. Tilda, for example, announces her intention of becoming a legally registered professional mourner (there are, we're told, only two currently registered in Nova Scotia). A woman who has miscarried four times sits with her husband at a table set for six; they are, she says, "simply a quiet family." And among the citizens of Middle Economy is a woman named Meticulous Spelling ("Maiden name: Meticulous Bartlett. Married George Spelling") who "couldn't spell worth a tiddly damn."

Norman, whose novels "The Northern Lights" and "The Bird Artist" were both nominated for the National Book Award, makes Wyatt a kindly and watchful narrator, painting a picture for his daughter so she can understand from what stuff she is made and of what stories she is woven. The letters, in their deceptively laconic way, tell of love and loss and remorse — and of one man's hope for an anodyne; something that might relieve a long-raw distress or grief. And when the book ends by returning us in a place we already know and have come to love, it feels exactly right; closing a circle by beginning anew.

Moira Macdonald is the movie critic for The Seattle Times.