HarperCollinsCanada, 325 pp, $32.95, hardcover.

Families are tricky things, as we all know--sometimes more so when they are accidental. Tessa McWatt's third novel, This Body, is a beautiful and lyrical story about accepting identity and building family.

When her baby sister Gwen is killed in a car accident in Guyana, 61-year-old Victoria becomes a guardian for her nephew Derek, a boy with a rabbit-shaped birthmark over his eye. Victoria came to London years before to seek her long-disappeared lover after he wrote saying he was making a new home in the city, where people pay little attention to one's past. She's a woman who has spent her whole life running from secrets in her past. Some are buried in her father's tomato garden; others melted away with Toronto's snowy winters.

A cache of old letters spins out the threads stitching Victoria's history together. Derek, who's looking for clues about his unknown father, becomes a clandestine reader of correspondence from his aunt's Toronto love Kola, a Gikuyu activist from Kenya. Victoria can't face Kola's ghost, and instead revisits her childhood home of Guyana via letters from Gwen. These pieces of history allow both characters to contemplate what loss has meant for the other and to weave a common view of their future.

Her nephew chafes at some of Victoria's more rigid views about food and parenting. He'd rather consume crisps and Cokes with his schoolmates, a crew of fatherless boys who trip in and out of trouble. Derek learns words can form protection from a schoolyard bully. He's held in admiration after he recasts Victoria's tale of the revenge demon Kanaima for his new English classmates. The legends of Arthur resonate for Derek, who conjures himself as a dragon slayer and then a wizard.

McWatt has a deft touch with evocative language. She's peppered her prose with vivid descriptions of colours and tastes, but her skill is also plainly evident in the way she spools out her characters' fears and epiphanies. For her novel about the deep complexities of the heart, it's fitting she's chosen as her epigraph a line from André Breton's Mad Love: "I want you to be madly loved."

Tessa McWatt appears at the Vancouver International Writers Festival Tuesday (October 19) at the Waterfront Theatre at 1 p.m., next Friday (October 22) at the Playwrights Theatre Centre at 1 p.m., and next Saturday (October 23) at the Waterfront Theatre at 2 p.m.