Each tale in this collection of eleven linked stories unfolds in a landscape, distinctly lush and evocative, where episodes from an individual life are transformed into moments of universal significance. In the title story, a child inhabits her own private realm within a maze of corridors and rooms in a hotel in Brazel where she comes to recognize the truth of what she alone has heard. In “The Blue of the Madrugada,” the girl grows into a wilful young woman and discovers the complexities of love by the light of blue candles. In “Taken for Delirium,” amid the revolving seasons and nature’s endless regeneration of the Ontario woods, the woman and her husband cope as their marriage falters. And in “The Still Point,” the young wife and mother, in a Mexican landscape mysterious with unexplained occurences, breaks free of her bonds.