Demons and Deities

Tragedy falls from the blue of a Nova Scotian beach day when 17-year-old Lisa MacKenzie rolls her 20-year-old brother Damian’s ATV into a shallow stream and, pinned underneath, drowns while he snoozes after a swim. The only sign that anything’s amiss is the distant sight of her kayak tied to his ATV’s trailer. Time stops for Damian as he and a stranger try to revive her, then watch helplessly as paramedics remove her body; and life virtually stops for her mother, Ingrid, as she faces every parent’s worst imagining. Thus opens Anne Simpson’s second novel, Falling, its events pooling around this incident, then rushing forward in a torrent that mimics time’s passage with an eerie verisimilitude.

Stymied by grief, mother and son face the inevitable “what ifs?”—all the ways they might have averted Lisa’s fate. The fact is, Lisa herself is largely the author of it, snitching the four-wheeler behind Damian’s back, without having driven it before. The fluke that...