Turtle Valley — Gail Anderson-Dargatz

"Anyone who thinks rural characters in Canadian fiction are dull and bland should pick up one of Gail Anderson-Dargatz's novels. . . . The only certainty in her world view is that anything can, and very often does, happen" (The Financial Post). That's certainly true of her newest, Turtle Valley, which is sure to be remembered as one of her most haunting and magical. The story -- of love and land and memory -- is propelled by a raging forest fire that sends flames raining down from the tops of the hills into the valley below. Kat, lonely and exhausted in her marriage to a man who has been brain damaged by a stroke, returns to the family home in Turtle Valley in order to help her elderly parents prepare to evacuate. As she sorts through her parents' belongings and wrestles with the terrible question of what to save and what to leave behind, Kat finds in her grandmother's precious carpet bag a clue to a decades-old family mystery.

As she tries to unravel the tangled threads of her family's past -- quickly, because the fire is starting to move down into the valley -- Kat discovers startling parallels between her grandmother's life and her own. She also renews an old friendship with a man who makes her wonder about possibilities she thought were long gone.