Just when the appropriation of voice issue has finally sputtered out, along comes another American novelist who dares to don the toque and parka of imagination and make like a Canadian. But Charlotte Bacon acquits herself decently. Lost Geography is a graceful first novel from the New Hampshire writer, whose 1998 story collection, A Private State, won a PEN/Hemingway Award. It follows four generations of a family across time and territory, from the endless prairies of Depression-era Saskatchewan to the endless metropolis of 1990s Manhattan.

The story begins in Regina, where a nurse encounters and marries a young Scottish immigrant. After the couple dies in an accident, their teenage daughter eschews both the family farm and secretarial school, and heads east. Hilda Campbell makes a life for herself, but a single experiment with sex leaves her pregnant and unmarried in 1950s Toronto. Hilda’s daughter Danielle becomes the next link in the chain, taking a chance trip to Paris that results in a new life there: marriage and children with a conflicted young English-Turkish man. The book closes with Sophie, Danielle’s child, who struggles to find a sense of place in the wake of her mother’s premature death, and the family’s sudden move to North America.

This all sounds rather grim, but Bacon’s clean and vivid prose raises the story above the pitfalls of melodrama. Mother-daughter relationships have had frequent airing in recent fiction, but Bacon’s talent for tough-minded yet reflective characters (of both sexes) moves her beyond conventionality. At once rooted and dreamy, the novel speculates on what binds people to home, what casts them from it, and what homes people choose in the wake of loss and change.

The story does become unmoored in the last quarter, as Bacon detours into an unwieldy parable concerning an enchanted carpet that becomes a landscape. In the end, Lost Geography values such mythical and psychic places above physical and historical ones – but that, perhaps, is Bacon’s view about the nature of belonging.