Connect Four

Toward the end of The Winter Wives, the first-person narrator, Byron, finds himself in the middle of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge. “The water, even from where I was standing, high above it, chilled me,” he confesses. “I could feel pressure in my bowels.”

Is acrophobia the fear of plummeting from high places or the “irrational fear of the urge to jump,” as Byron has sometimes heard? He has good reason to fear either way, as falling has been something of a recurring theme in his nearly sixty years. And while it’s obvious what would happen to him if he were to plunge into Halifax Harbour some fifty metres below, just as his uncle did many years before, Byron’s fate is almost incidental by this point in Linden MacIntyre’s thoughtful new novel. Far more compelling are the shifting longings and compulsions that time and again set Byron up to fall in the first place.

The Winter Wives actually opens with a fall — but not Byron’s. Instead it’s...