Shaking the Family Tree

In Mary Lawson’s new novel, Road Ends, the young but determined Megan Cartwright is the most hopeful of three unhappy protagonists. Having spent her childhood and adolescence looking after the many brothers that her maternity-addled mother and emotionally absent father were too preoccupied to care for themselves, she finally escapes Northern Ontario at the age of 21 and makes it to London in 1966.

Of course, Lawson herself was the one who got away. She grew up in a small farming community in southwestern Ontario but left for England many years ago. Having married an Englishman, she lives outside London but returns to Canada regularly—not only in person but more importantly, in her imagination, having created the fictional Northern Ontario town of Struan, the setting for her best-selling 2002 debut novel, Crow Lake, and both its successors. It is a return not only to the...