Carol Bruneau writes stories to get lost in. Her latest novel, Glass Voices, is simply the best thing she's done yet, and by far the most ambitious. It's a page-turner that's both shattering and redemptive. It's also a confection of words, written (like all Bruneau's books) so magically that when she describes something it's completely new and at the same time so exact that you wonder how it is she's been first to say it. This writer is pitch perfect. And the stories she tells! In Glass Voices we have a sort of stations-of-the-cross ordeal where a simple woman gutted by the greatest of all losses flounders through confusion, despair, defiance, fatigue, and hope. (For all that, Bruneau even finds room for a few laughs.) The tale is homespun and no less stirring for that. It puts Bruneau in the class of writers like McEwan and Coetzee: in telling us the sentinel truths of our time, they're writers who also "act locally but think globally." Bruneau's world in this book, like most of her books, is reduced to Nova Scotia and especially Cape Breton, but her real canvas is nothing less than the cosmos in all its heft and silence, bitter and sweet. Don't miss it.