HK$195

Poet-turned-novelist Anne Michaels' latest work, The Winter Vault, comes more than a decade after the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces, and it arrives with just the kind of emotional conflict, historical inspiration and poetic language that propelled her debut.

The Winter Vault follows a couple, Jean and Avery, as their young marriage frays after the appearance of a still-born daughter. The novel begins in 1964, in Egypt, as engineer Avery works on a project to move and rebuild the renowned temple at Abu Simbel to make way for the Aswan Dam. Michaels moves the novel through the Egyptian desert, eastern Europe and a small Canadian town. The people who inhabit them all seem to carry a sense of loss nearly impossible to shake: that of a loved one, or a home along a river, sometimes both.

After learning that the plot of land where her late husband is buried will be overtaken by the altered St Lawrence River, a widow unleashes a tirade of both 'disgust and despair' on Avery, who can only offer: 'But they can move your husband's body ... the company will pay the expenses.'

'Can you move what was consecrated?' she asks, weeping. 'Can you move that exact empty place in the earth I was to lie next to him for eternity? It's the loneliness of eternity I'm talking about! Can you move all those things?'

Elsewhere, blackbirds circle in the sky 'as if they could bore a hole in the emptiness'; a man describes 'the hot kiss of whisky between her legs'. This is the stuff of poetry and makes for rewards during slower stretches of the novel.

While loss connects the people and places of The Winter Vault, nuance is occasionally swallowed by Michaels' emphasis on how characters feel it, especially in a parent-child relationship. Jean becomes defined by how much she misses her mother, who died when she was a child; Avery remains haunted by the legacy of his father.

But it is in Michaels' reconstruction of history that the novel thrives: scenes where the temple is taken down and pieced back together; or where Lucjan, the lover Jean takes after she and Avery separate, tells her of growing up in Warsaw during the second world war. 'I can only speak if you are lying next to me, he said, as close as my voice, my words throughout the length of your body, because what I am going to say is my entire life.' This Lucjan tells Jean, before they become romantically involved - a sincere and clever pick-up line.