Saskatchewan Journey

Dianne Warren is a writer whose narrative technique is so subtle she might be an author without a strong sense of how her fiction works. Or perhaps with Liberty Street, her first novel since the Governor General’s Award–winning Cool Water, the vivid prose came off the tips of her fingers without much conscious effort.

The reader wonders whether Liberty Street is somehow upside down—a collection of chapters that function almost independently of one another, seemingly shuffled into random order. Because the big reveal—what most novels’ opening pages of fiction point toward—occurs on page 2 of this deceptively mundane tale.

“We were firmly lodged in a traffic jam in a small Irish town,” says the narrator, Frances Moon, in the first sentence of the book. And then, several hundred words on: “I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene unfolding … Just nineteen, I thought, and a baby too.” Frances is repeating the words of the local...