She looks over at Ansel seated alone in the window, lifts her hand to him in greeting. Cho stands up and massages her lower back. It was a kind of neighbourhood haircut.” Every now and then, Mrs. “All the kids would come with their plastic scissors and help her out.

Gail, who had grown up in a house a block away, once told Ansel that she remembered this same woman snipping the grass when Gail herself was a child. She is in her mid-sixties and the wide brim of a sun hat shades her face. Across the street, their neighbour is crouched on the ground, snipping the grass with a pair of scissors. There is a sunroom at the front of the house where Ansel drinks his coffee. When Ansel listens to them, the finished and the unfinished work, the quality of the recording is fine, as if Gail is in the room herself, her voice preserved on a quarter-inch strip of tape. Some in the attic of her parents’ house, and some in her former office. Some of her work, the tapes and reel-to-reel, are in the house. Morning passed into afternoon, the rest of the world waited outside, but he and Gail were just rising from bed, they were fumbling into their clothes, they knew that the day was long. He curved his body around hers and Gail’s warmth drew him back into sleep. In what was to have been the future, Ansel rolled towards her, half awake, half forgetful. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Thien reveals herself as a novelist of rare and potent talent.

Vivid, poignant, wise, at once sweeping and intimate, Certainty is a novel about the legacies of loss, about the dislocations of war and the redemptive qualities of love.

Gail’s journey to unravel the mystery of her parents’ lives takes her to Amsterdam, where she meets the war photographer Sipke, who tells his story of Ani and their relationship, which began in Jakarta, a story that will bring Gail face to face with the complications in her own life and lead her closer to the truth. The legacy of their connection is later inherited by Matthew’s wife, Clara, in unexpected ways. The war shatters their families and splits the two apart until years later, when they remeet only to be separated again. As children, they found themselves together under the terrifying shadow of war in Japanese-occupied Sandakan, Malaysia. Gail Lim, a producer of radio documentaries in present-day Vancouver, finds herself haunted by events in her parents’ past in wartorn Asia, a past which remains a mystery that fiercely grips her imagination.Īs a child, Gail’s father, Matthew Lim, wandered the Leila Road and the jungle fringe with his lovely Ani, a girl whose early bond with Matthew will affect his life always. Madeleine Thien’s stunning debut novel fulfills all her early promise and introduces a young novelist of vision, maturity, and style.

Thien madeleine