What is it like to have the fixed assumptions of your world suddenly shaken? The people of Waldenstein, a tiny, isolated German community in early 20th-century Nova Scotia, survive lives of intolerable hardship through their unquestioning belief in a pre-Enlightenment Lutheranism. But when the most prominent man in the community fathers the child of his neighbour's daughter, Erika, and a new clergyman from Europe arrives to shake the certainties of faith, their firm ideas are overturned. Erika flees to England, to encounter her own uncertainties there, and years later her son, obsessed with finding his father, comes back to confront both the changing world of Waldenstein and his half-siblings.

Rosalie Osmond is a native of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, but spent a large part of her adult life in England. Educated at Acadia University, Bryn Mawr College, and Cambridge University, she has taught English literature at the university level in Canada and the U.K. She has published three works of nonfiction. Broken Symmetry is her second novel, and was shortlisted in 2020 for the Jim Connors Dartmouth (fiction) Atlantic Book Award. Her debut novel, Waldenstein had previously been shortlisted for the same award, and in 2019 Rosalie was the recipient of the Rita Joe poetry prize. She is married with three children and six grandchildren, all of whom love to come and visit in the summer.

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