Wheels of Time

There is a growth on the back of Kathleen’s neck. A mole is “flirting with the idea of becoming cancerous” despite the decades that the gardener has spent pulling on protective gear — collared shirts, hats, gloves — before working in the sun. She also feels a pain in her mouth, from “a molar that has been warning her off and on for years.” In Sarah Leipciger’s Moon Road, Kathleen’s body and mind are both at a precipice. Her ex-husband’s arrival has forced her to take stock of the way her grief has festered, accumulated, and, like a cancer, grown from passive abnormality into something more insidious.

Leipciger delicately explores confrontation. Her prose is quiet and reflects Kathleen’s tired, nearly hopeless spirit. One day, Yannick, who has long since remarried, shows up after decades of silence to see if she will join him on a cross-country road trip to British Columbia. The police in Tofino have discovered human remains that are a possible match to...