There’s the story, and then there’s the story telling. In most novels, one outshines the other. Terry Jordan, however, confounds us if we attempt to choose one over the other in this, his first full-length novel.

Exposing a plot with so many twists that it could only happen in a family, Jordan, from small-town Saskatchewan, employs a lyrical style that effortlessly transports the reader back and forth between a dream world and the real one.

A family secret – no respectable family of fiction is ever without at least one – hangs over Nathan Mann. He relives the roller-coaster life he shared with his loving but unconventional parents until, at age seven, an emotional explosion changed everything and left him unsure of his real identity.

Jordan assembles a bizarre cast to populate Nathan’s often painful recollections. There’s an itinerant actor turned confidence trickster whose wife cannot bear to ask him where his money comes from. There’s a prostitute too preoccupied with her own sensuality to deal with motherhood, and a small-town beauty who is swept off her feet by a stranger who dreams he is a wild dog, endlessly pursuing prey. As lovers, the two are so smitten that they are blissfully unaware of the ominous cloud that threatens their happiness.

Always, it’s what’s not said that counts. What’s real? What’s just suspicion? The reader is challenged to provide speculative answers. Family bonds are stretched by a series of convulsive conflicts, but they hold, binding together those who hate as well as those who love.

Jordan’s gift is his instinctive insight, and he shares it liberally in this novel. We are in turn drawn to and repelled by characters whose vulnerability has disturbingly familiar dimensions.

If this book has a jarring note, it is in the abruptness of the transition from childhood memories to the revelations that come to the narrator as an adult. The last few pages tersely supply the few pieces still missing, but we’re left feeling vaguely let down by the mundanity of the truth. That, of course, is art imitating life.