LINDA OLSSON'S MELANCHOLY "SONATA"

Full of music, memory and melancholy, Linda Olsson's second novel is about how grief can be overcome, if not forgotten. Told from the perspective of Adam Anker, a classical musician, "Sonata for Miriam" begins in the present in New Zealand and then dips into the past in Poland and Sweden, the author's place of birth.

Adam's story is set in motion by two events. While considering a museum exhibit about the second world war, he comes across an old woman's plea to find an Adam Lipski, his own birth name: "I saw my brother Adam for the last time in November 1939. I was told he fled to Lithuania together with a friend. I have never stopped thinking about him. I have never stopped searching. I have never stopped hoping."

On that same day Adam's daughter Miriam, the "warm centre" around which his life revolves, is killed in an accident. For the next year Adam lives in a trance-like state of grief. Eventually realising that "good or bad, our past is the reference we need to enable the future", he sets off for Europe in search of the truth of his family's history. In doing so, he finally makes peace with Cecilia, the woman who forced him choose between his love for her and their newborn child.

"Sonata for Miriam" is notable for Olsson's sensitivity to human emotions and her lyrical, pared-down prose--not a word is out of place. Now living in New Zealand, she deftly captures the flavour and feel of the countries she portrays. Waiheke Island in northern New Zealand is a place of sunlit decks, ferns swaying in warm breezes and cold beer. Kraków, Poland, is filled with fastidious old men who eat chopped egg and beetroot and play chess in dark apartments full of pictures of the dead ("nothing looked new but neither did it look neglected"). The winter landscape of Sweden is monochromatic, cold: icy water greedily swallows the sun's warmth; boats sleep under tarpaulins; old houses hunch together in a landscape of shades of grey.

Tying the whole together is Adam's tragic, joyful story, a perceptive reminder of the impact of history on personal lives. Too many second novels fail to deliver on the promise of the author's first: this complex and beguiling book is not one them.

"Sonata for Miriam" by Linda Olsson (Penguin; 273 pages)

~ HELENA DOUGLAS