“The bridge between the world of the dead and the world of the living is the sleeper’s mind,” Pan Bouyoucas writes at the beginning of his novel The Man Who Wanted to Drink Up the Sea. In the novel Lukas, a Greek-Canadian living in Montreal, tries to cross that bridge in order to apologize to his first love, whom he spurned when he was 17.

Zephira, a beautiful fisherman’s daughter who died very young, visits Lukas in his dreams when he is 58. The way he treated her – leaving her without explanation one moonlit night on the beach – has always been one of his regrets. But he has not let that stop him from immigrating to Canada, marrying relatively happily, and becoming the classic expansive, life-affirming owner of a successful Greek restaurant.

When Zephira begins to appear in his dreams, though, he is profoundly upset. He wants to apologize to her, but he wakes up each time before he can. So he takes a sleeping pill and goes to sleep in his car in his garage on a night when his wife thinks he is playing poker.

It’s cold, though, and just before he falls asleep, Lukas turns on the car’s engine to warm up. The result is predictable: carbon monoxide poisoning. What is less predictable is the Fellini-like chase Zephira leads him through the land of the dead. Bouyoucas intercuts Lukas’s pursuit with the agonies of his family when he is discovered, near death, and the fight by hospital staff to resuscitate him.

Bouyoucas was born in Lebanon to Greek parents and immigrated to Canada at, significantly, age 17. His plays have been produced in both English and French, and he was a finalist for the French-language Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2001. This is his first novel written originally in English, but there is no sign that he is writing in his second or third language. He seems able to bridge linguistic divides in the same way he claims that dreams bridge life and death. He has written a novel that is both funny and chilling as it touches the place where fears of death hide in the daytime.