Throughout this book, Shirley is on the search for her lover Coenraad, a James-Bond type man who works for The Agency. She left her husband and kids to follow him around the globe based on secret codes in magazines. This search leads her to Toronto, where she grew up, and wandering the city based on a code she can't quite interpret, to immigrant bakeries, attics with operatic singers, through blue collar neighbourhoods, movie theatres, art galleries, and hotel bars.

The premise of the book makes the reader think they may be reading a romance, or a drama, or mystery. However, it quickly becomes obvious that Shirley is not her own woman, as her jet-setting, lover-taking, black dress and pearls might suggest, but instead a woman who is committed to a man who hardly gives her the time of day. And each destination in her search for her lover presents a vignette of women and the men that control them: financially, emotionally, sexually, and violently. These vignettes are beautifully written and haunting; the the way they are written lends the feeling of impermanence and disassociation: it feels like Shirley is dreaming, or a ghost wandering the world until she can be real in the arms of Coenraad.

The ending, its own vignette revealing Shirley's departure from her family, was not at all what was expected -- but what should I have expected so far into the book. It ultimately leaves you with a sense of a new path, and of hope.