Family and memory, intertwined concepts that are as complicated as they are ephemeral, are at the center of Felt, Canadian author Mark Blagrave's deceptively quiet novel. The book begins with Penelope, a woman from the small maritime town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, who wonders if Matt, her son, is doing well at school, and if her mother, Thora, packed a lunch for him. Then Penelope remembers: she's 96, and Matt, a museum curator in Toronto, Ontario, is "nearer retirement than graduation." Matt, worried about Penelope's advancing Alzheimer's disease, travels home from Toronto to check up on Penelope and conduct research for a model villages exhibition for his museum. Matt's wife, Jennifer, is glad to have him out of town for a while.
The bulk of the novel shifts between richly detailed scenes of Matt's return to St. Andrews and flashbacks to Matt's and Penelope's pasts. The latter includes Thora's arrival in Canada from her native Norway to work as a packer at a sardine plant, Penelope's decades running a shop that sold items like Fair Isle sweaters and the "embroidered bags and felted land-and-seascapes" she and Thora made, and a female employee who may have been in love with her. Matt, meanwhile, recounts an extramarital relationship with a Toronto artist, reunites with a St. Andrews woman he dated 40 years earlier, and discovers secrets about Penelope's past. The time shifts occasionally sap the momentum, but Felt is a heartfelt paean to memory and the vagaries of time. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer