Set in a small town in Ireland, this amazing story is told through the eyes of a huge cast of characters. Inhabitants of the same village, they are connected in various ways to its troubles, past and present. I was drawn in immediately, as much for the stark beauty of Ryan’s language as for the story itself.

Since childhood I’ve loved looking at the night sky. Though I know little enough about astronomy, Starry Nights on Burnaby Mountain had long been on my radar. On a cool clear evening, I finally attended the event. While waiting to enter the room housing the big telescope, I looked through one of the external telescopes and saw a comet.

For some reason, I expected this book to be funny. Beyond a hilarious incident described in the opening essay, it was anything but. Also unexpectedly, it proved a page turner—not what one expects from a book of essays.

The novel opens on a murky night in Troubles era Northern Ireland. Briefly, we meet a boy who “never strays from” the familiar boundaries of “a meshed grid of streets and a couple of roads that only rarely has he followed into the city’s centre.” This child, the product of poverty, ignorance and violence, nurtures a single ambition: “The desire to be someone.”

On the surface, this simple tale relates a frail old man’s imminent separation from the beloved dog he’s no longer able to care for. From the beginning, the reader knows Bo will have to let Sixten go and will blame his son Hans for relocating the animal.

Set in homestead country near Lacombe in the first decade of the twentieth century, the story portrays a disparate group of women with one goal in common: to have homes of their own. This is an era when women had no vote and no property rights.

We meet Seamus sporting his new corduroy trousers, an innocent five-year-old Seamus who dismays his elders by asking the title question with a smile on his face. It will be a long time before true comprehension enters his little heart. “I knew Heaven was a real, physical place, and I couldn’t visit her there…she’d previously spent time in Belfast, where I could visit her, but it was made clear to me that heaven and Belfast were different in that respect and several others.”