Ivory Frame, the 92-year-old protagonist of Heidi Sopinka’s powerful debut novel The Dictionary of Animal Languages, has carefully crafted her life. She lives in isolation in a small house in rural France where she continues working on the titular dictionary, a decades-long immersion in the natural world in which Frame transcribes the voices of animals. What is truly troubling, however, is the news that she has a granddaughter. Disavowed by her family, and expelled from boarding school, Frame arrived in Paris in the 1930s to study art, falling in with a group of bohemian artists and writers. In particular, her involvement with Lev, a Russian painter, broken and hard, will shape her life even seven decades later.

Source: thestar February 16, 2018 11:26 UTC