The Ice Bridge

This evocative literary romance from Canadian-born Stanford professor MacDonald (Lauchlin of the Bad Heart) takes place on isolated, rugged Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, during the 1990s. Forty-seven-year-old artist Anna Starling flees her small Northern California college town and philandering husband Chet and rents a rickety old house to concentrate on her art. Her closest neighbor is the Scotsman “Red Murdock” MacLennan, a talented cabinetmaker who’s been drowning in drink his grief over his girlfriend’s death from brain cancer. He saves Anna one night after she plunges through the thin ice on her pond and they go on to forge a friendship, while Anna also gets to know local dressmaker Breagh Carmichael and learns to cope with the “grinding cold” of a Canadian winter. So when she finds, during a beachcombing excursion, a shipment of marijuana lost by local drug dealers, it’s Murdock she turns to for advice. Anna is a believable but not always sympathetic protagonist, leaving the supporting character of Murdock to make the most memorable impression in MacDonald’s satisfying, bittersweet tale of love and loss. Agent: John Pearce, Westwood Creative Artists. (May)