Set aside your spring chores and cancel the rest of your plans when you pick up The Winter Vault. Thirteen years after her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, Canadian writer Anne Michaels unfolds the unforgettable story of Avery and Jean, who meet near land flooded by the St. Lawrence Seaway project. After their marriage, they live in Egypt, where Avery is an engineer responsible for rescuing the temples at Abu Simbel from the floodwaters of the Nile, as part of the Aswan High Dam construction in the mid-1960s. In both projects, lives and memories are uprooted with the landscape as entire communities are relocated. Michaels uses the structure of the novel to portray this displacement and this dislocation, juxtaposing water against desert, flow against flood, showing some of the ways people respond to emotional and physical dislocation.

In Egypt, Avery works with old sandstone and modern plans, while Jean observes the locals and tries to understand their lives. When their first child dies in utero, their relationship breaks. Their loss is the stone in the river that a Nubian friend describes as the one that splits the waters.

Back in Canada, Avery does not know how to help Jean—or himself—grieve, and leaves her. She becomes involved with Lucjan, an older man who survived the war as a Jewish orphan in Warsaw, and is now known as the Caveman because of the paintings he creates on Toronto fences late at night. He draws Jean, and they become lovers. It is Lucjan's stories—and his challenges—that help Jean start to return to life. A year after their daughter's death, Jean and Avery meet, unplanned, at her grave, and begin to walk back to each other.

Michaels is the author of three books of poetry, and her phrases and images echo back and forth through the novel. The title refers to the buildings where bodies wait until the ground thaws and graves can be dug, a metaphor for the temporary holding place we all visit in our lives, but rarely name. The Winter Vault requires close reading, but when you finish, you'll want to turn back and read it all again.

Leslie Budewitz lives and writes near Flathead Lake in western Montana.

Copyright 2009 BookPage Reviews.

Canadian poet/novelist's second work of fiction (after Fugitive Pieces) will likely be one of the more beautiful and startlingly written works you'll read this year—and one of the more infuriating. It's a meditation on loss, as exemplified by the flooding that obliterated towns and cemeteries, flora and fauna when the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Aswan Dam were created. Jean met Avery while trying to rescue plants that will be drowned by the St. Lawrence floodwaters; Avery was one of the seaway's engineers. Soon they are married and living on a houseboat on the Nile as Avery works to save Abu Simbel. What can't be saved is a millennia-old culture whose devastation is chronicled in eye-opening detail. It's heartbreaking but also frustrating. Michaels keeps a distance, weaving through time in a drily lyrical tone that creates an appropriate sense of dislocation but can leave the reader stranded; in the end, this story is not animated by story. A challenge but definitely worth pondering. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/08.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Profound loss, desolation and rebuilding are the literal and metaphoric themes of Michaels's exquisite second novel (after Fugitive Pieces). Avery Escher is a Canadian engineer recently moved to a houseboat on the Nile with his new wife, Jean, in 1964. Avery's part of a team of engineers trying to salvage Abu Simbel, which is about to be flooded by the new Aswan dam. His wife, Jean, meanwhile, carries with her childhood memories of flooded villages and the heavy absence of her mother, who died when she was young. Now, the sight of the entire Nubian nation being evacuated from their native land before it's flooded affects both Avery and Jean intensely. Jean's pregnancy seems a possible redemption, but their daughter is stillborn, and Jean falls into despair, shunning the former intimacy of her marriage. When the couple returns to Canada, they set up separate lives and another man enters the picture. Michaels is especially impressive at making a rundown of construction materials or the contents of a market as evocative as the shared moments between two young lovers. A tender love story set against an intriguing bit of history is handled with uncommon skill. (May)