I love fiction with a strong sense of place as much as I also love books that tell of journeys. Whether the hero’s fate is bound up with literal odysseys and labyrinths, or whether the journey is more symbolic, a quest shapes a story in a fundamental way. The process of reading is a journey itself, with a departure, a pilgrim’s progress of sorts, and something resembling an arrival. Like the protagonist, readers too may face their share of challenges and get to pick up a surprising variety of things—wisdom, knowledge, comfort, disillusionment, a better vocabulary—along the way. I was a little surprised myself, after I wrote the book, when I saw the extent to which The Suspension Bridge followed the pattern of a pilgrim’s progress, a modern and darkly comic version, in the story of Sister Harriet navigating her first year of teaching at Saint Reginald’s.

Where does the fascination with the journey come from? Is it that we’re restless, or is it that we recognize the mutability of everything, like Lucretius and his famous river of change? Here are nine books that play with the idea of inevitable change and its attendant losses, and where the journey or quest is the search for renewed meaning, intimately connected in many cases to escape and survival.

*****

The Hidden Keys, by André Alexis

André Alexis wrote a contemporary take on the quest novel in this engaging book. Several of his novels seem to me to be about journeys, paradises lost and paradises probably not regained despite irrepressible undercurrents of joy. The Hidden Keys is a funny adventure tale in which colourful characters compete in an caper-ish hunt for a dubious treasure, but it’s also an exploration of how humans should behave along the way in the journey of life.

*

Wandering Souls in Paradise Lost, by Hélène Rioux

There are few chuckles in this at times tender and at times disturbing collection of linked stories, all somehow involving a humble café in a lost corner of Montreal where taxi drivers and other ambulent souls come in the hope of finding something more than poutine and coffee. Rioux explicitly borrows from Dante and Milton in her accounts of these hapless travellers. The flavour of being kicked out of Eden is strong. Everyone’s a survivor of one kind or another, contemplating loss and struggling to make sense of their world.

*

Blessed Nowhere, by Catherine Black

Soon to join my to-be-read stack, this winner of the 2024 Guernica Prize tells the story of Abby, who ditches her unbearable life after the loss of her son and, in a desperate effort to escape, takes an exit south and keeps driving. She ends up in central Mexico, in a hotel that’s a home to other lost souls, where she must finally confront her grief.     

*

Permanent Astonishment, by Tomson Highway

If your taste runs to writers who see life as a quirky celebration of survival, you will want to read Permanent Astonishment, Highway’s enjoyable memoir of his Cree childhood in northern Canada. Memoirs, by their nature, are narratives that look back on the journey of life, and may be quite elegiac as they contemplate vanished things. Permanent Astonishment uses myth to explore the author’s losses but to also show the things he gained along the way. Laughter triumphs and the overall mood of this book brings you beyond survival to transcendence.

*

The Dark King Swallows the World, by Robert G. Penner

Quests may be modest and private and they may be grand and epic. The Dark King Swallows the World, about an American adolescent in World War 2 Cornwall who is trying to save her grief-stricken mother from the clutches of a bad man, takes Nora on a journey to the land of the dead, where she encounters faeries, giants and the fearsome lord of the underworld. Nora’s arduous journey, set against the gloomy backdrop of war, is a dark one, but, in the words of one reviewer, Penner’s tale "rises towards the light."

*    

Standing in the Shadows, by Peter Robinson

This is the last of the books of popular mystery writer Peter Robinson, who died in 2022. In a sense all mystery stories are quest fiction, in which a detective character is on a journey to uncover truth. This often involves separate journeys within the quest, both into the past and into the dark heart of human motive. Standing in the Shadows moves backwards and forwards in time as Alan Banks, one of the genre’s most appealing detectives, plays time traveller on a hunt for the clues to solve a long ago murder still haunting the present.

*

Snow Road Station, by Elizabeth Hay

Like detective fiction, modern women’s fiction places heavy reliance on the idea of the quest. Practically endless are the books, from low-brow to high-brow, about women on a personal journey to find something important, often described simply as just "themselves." Sixty-year-old Lulu Blake, an actor, after blanking her lines one stormy night in a play, beats a retreat into her past to remote Snow Road Station—a real place in Ontario—where she must reckon with all the striving and searching that have shaped her life.  For the protagonist, whose emotional journey will continue, Snow Road Station is “a place of rest, of stoppage, yet a road.”

*

Survivors of the Hive, by Jason Heroux

This brief collection of linked surrealist stories packs a big emotional punch.  Everyone is on a search for meaning, and everyone is pretty lost, hapless survivors floating aimlessly outside the hive. The sense of a chaotic journey is especially strong in the last story, in which the narrator wanders the labyrinthine halls of a school in search of a poetry contest he must judge. Like the other characters, he never arrives at his destination, being instead waylaid by misdirecting and mad guides. In these stories, the reader senses that the world could end at any time, but meanwhile the task at hand is figuring out how to live with what’s left.

*

I Think We’ve Been Here Before, by Suzy Krause

Suzy Krause’s characters also have to figure out how to live with what’s left. The title of this book suggests hapless humans go round in circles. But it also hints at lessons that can be learned and the meaning-creating strategies that help in the interim. The Jorgensen family has just found out that one of their members is dying of terminal cancer, and also that the world will end in a matter of months. The period allotted to the Jorgensens must inevitably be devoted to figuring out how to conduct their lives during the little time they’ve been given. In the interstellar void, whose vastness we know about due to watching those Morgan Freeman-narrated shows, all lives are puny. Suzy Krause hones in on the small and impermanent, subtly drawing attention to its tenderness and its value.

*

Learn more about The Suspension Bridge:

“I loved and admired this book.” – Alan Bradley, New York Times bestselling author

In this irreverent and immersive pilgrim’s progress set in a Canadian river city, Sister Harriet of Bingham rides in on a train on a muggy, late August afternoon, to undertake her duties as teacher of advanced academic subjects at Saint Reginald’s Academy. It seems to survivor Harriet a lovely place but, before long, the school’s top girls begin to disappear. Between reluctant sleuthing, teaching and driving around in the convent’s Rambler Custom Cross-Country wagon, Harriet hardly has time for her secret identity crisis. But it’s 1962 and the whole world is on the move.  Hellbent on glory, Bothonville (pronounced Buttonville) is building a gigantic bridge, whether a stairway to heaven or a highway to hell very much depends. One thing becomes clear, and that is that everyone in Bothonville is falling victim to its seductive influence. As safe and self-satisfied Bothonville becomes an increasingly dangerous place to be, Harriet has to reckon with her memories and plot a way forward. Will she stay or will we see her with a rucksack on her back hopping a Greyhound bus, on another late summer day a year later?