The two main characters in [Linda Ducharme]'s novel -- a novella, really, as it runs only 121 pages -- are Dr. Doris Kairborn, a lonely white 30-something small-town physician, and Meg Featherchild, an unresponsive 70-something hospice patient to whom Doris is inexplicably drawn.

Within moments of meeting Meg, Doris becomes obsessed with finding out why the aboriginal woman appears so distressed. Within days of becoming so obsessed, Doris manages to learn every remarkable detail about Meg's painful past.

It seems almost as though Ducharme determined the novel's brevity in advance and then tried to pack the story about Doris and Meg and their unlikely friendship into those limited pages.