Withheld until the final pages, Maggie and Am's secret is treated as the novel's 'big reveal.' Once we learn it, however, the real question turns from what to why.

Maggie lends Tress a sympathetic ear, but stops short of discussing the unspoken weight that's been bearing down on her own 25-year marriage and that's recently driven her into the arms of Lukas, the disconsolate director of the local choral society. She confides her feelings to her aunt Maggie, who lives childlessly with her husband Am in an apartment sandwiched between the town's post office and the clock tower where Am works as caretaker. Though an unanticipated letter from Hugh, a friend from the war who's recovering from TB at an east coast sanatorium, buoys his spirits, Kenan nevertheless finds his thoughts turning, guiltily and often, to the less happy fate of their mutual friend Bill on a French battlefield.Īfter enduring months of Kenan's solitary, uncommunicative behaviour, his wife Tress (whose sister Grania was the heroine of Itani's breakout 2003 novel Deafening) is losing hope and patience. Kenan is also suffering classic-some might say clichéd-symptoms of shellshock: he doesn't speak of the war, never goes outside, stares mutely off into the distance, shouts out in his sleep. Kenan has returned from the war to his hometown of Deseronto literally half the man he used to be: he has just one working arm and eye and half his face is 'sealed by rippled scars.' Of course, that's just what you can see.

Set a year after the end of the First World War, Frances Itani's Tell, which has been longlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize, is a portrait of two small-town Ontario marriages left rudderless by loss.

Tell by frances itani