USA publisher: The Free Press (Simon & Schuster)

(This excerpt is from the middle of the novel. Daniel Mulvaugh, the protagonist, is in an extremely heightened emotional state--verging on a breakdown--and is overcome by an impulse to speak to his long-estranged wife, Sally).

In the street, an impatient breeze, the rain spattering down as if spilling over the edges of the full clouds. Daniel walked quickly to consume his nervous energy. He thought of his wife among the daffodils: if he could have said something then. But he hadn't had it then, had now--or almost--the thing to be said. Daniel knew there was something a little crazy about this, but he'd been filled in these last few hours with the conviction that he mustn't allow it to be too late again.

He joined a nun in full habit at the bus stop. When she turned to smile at him, he was confronted by a pretty face covered in acne. He reached for his cigarettes, but the 33 arrived. It would take him right to his wife.

He sat toward the front. On the seat before him was a man wearing a tiny fawn-coloured cap on his fat, bald head. It made Daniel think, for some reason, of pork in muslin. At the back of the bus, on one of the seats facing the aisle, sat a woman who struck him as an impeccably maintained cul-de-sac of feeling, her beauty as unimpeachable as it was bland.

The bus halted outside the senior centre. A half dozen old men and women staggered on. They seemed to Daniel like the remnants of an army, routed again, bearing their blue-rinse hair and liver-spotted hands, their wounds and their shame.

The bus crossed Richmond Bridge and stopped again. Two women boarded, a young woman with a baby and an older woman carrying the folded stroller. They sat on the vacant seat across the aisle from his. The baby lay jerky and boneless in its mother's arms, vagrant expressions flickering across its face. He noticed the grandmother's hands, fused into the semblance of fins by arthritis.

The mother, who seemed still in a kind of postbirth euphoria, had placed her hand under the baby's downy skull, as if she were learning, with an ecstatic intimacy, the word skull, as one could only learn it by feeling one bared to the bone, and one, such as this, so recently filled and fleshed. And somewhere deep in him Daniel felt this, the tiny head in her hand, not as something soft but as an edging spur of his crystalline life.

Daniel glanced down at his own hands. They were trembling. Was he feeling poorly? Was this what it was like? This brittleness and awful lucidity? Was he having a breakdown? He mustn't. Mustn't. He became aware that a number of people on the bus were staring at him.

He looked over at the baby again. It seemed to smile, then tried to put its whole fist into its mouth. He felt such tenderness for it, felt that he could regain his equilibrium if he could touch it, touch its foot, hold its foot for just a second.

Easy, though--too easy--to feel for such things. It was when feeling was expected, needed, directed, that something in him refused to respond. It was the specificity of the love his wife had demanded that had been too hard.

The baby made a loud noise and squirmed. The mother and grandmother responded with encouraging sounds. It hurt him to look at the child. Sally had so much wanted a child. He thought of how fearful he would have been to be responsible for something so fragile, felt it in him, that fear, like the bulb of this baby's head, heavy with potential, the bone a membrane yet, crust of this little world closing up about a liquid core that would itself harden into discernment, prejudice, obsession--all the igneous forms of our limitations.