A macabre setup makes for a surprisingly moving read in Canadian writer Itani's second novel to be published in the U.S. (after Deafening). Ottawa born and bred octogenarian Georgie Danforth Whitley has always noted similarities-including their birth dates-between herself and Queen Elizabeth, whom she privately imagines as "Lilibet, a kind of parallel life-mate." A serendipitous invitation to enjoy a birthday lunch with the queen in London gives Georgie a rare opportunity to experience independence from her 103-year-old mother and her 50-something daughter. However, a momentary distraction on the drive to the airport ends with Georgie's car falling to the bottom of a ravine-with no one, except maybe Lilibet, knowing she is missing. Minutes turn into days with a wounded Georgie flashing back to pivotal (and not-so-pivotal) moments in her past as she attempts to crawl to her car. The narrative gathers momentum as Georgie's plight becomes increasingly dire and she searches through her catalogue of memories for a measure of her life's worth. The ending, with its potential for melodrama, is expertly played; throughout, Itani handles her tension-fraught material with a precise, light touch. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Canadian Georgina Danforth was born the same day as Elizabeth II, but she doesn't make the special 80th-birthday party to which she has been invited, having landed in a ditch on the way to the airport. From the author of the best-selling Deafening. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

NEAR the beginning of Frances Itani's latest novel, "Remembering the Bones," Georgie Danforth Whitley, a Canadian widow, is bound for London to meet Queen Elizabeth. The two share a birthday, and Georgie is one of 99 commoners invited to a celebratory luncheon. But despite careful planning, she will not make it to the palace. En route to the local airport, her car slips through a pair of guard posts and flips down a hillside, throwing her into the brush and leaving no trace of her accident visible from the road above. Helpless and alone, she staves off thirst by sucking on the silver buttons of her cardigan. Panic is staved off by revisiting 80 years' worth of memories in which she has been daughter and granddaughter, sister and niece, mother, wife and widow. As Georgie tries, painfully, to drag herself toward the relative safety of her car - and realizes she may instead be inching toward death - she reflects that "people die holding their secrets, their loves, their pains." The novel's central question becomes not so much "Will Georgie live?" as "What has Georgie's life meant?" The framework for answering that metaphysical question is the same one that allows us to decipher the simple mechanics of animal life: the skeleton. Since childhood, Georgie has comforted herself by cataloging the bones pictured in her grandfather's 1901 edition of Gray's Anatomy. With several of hers now broken, she conjures up their names, triggering a chain of memories in which each bone plays a small but important role. With a shattered leg, in a section called "Tibia," Georgie remembers her grandmother, a formidable midwife who was so distressed on receiving news of her husband's death that she let an ax slice into her leg while chopping wood. With an aching shoulder, in "Scapula," Georgie remembers the thrill of tying her own shoes for the first time and of attending the grand opening of her daughter's new theater, as well as the sorrow of consigning her mother (still alive, with shoulders growing into a hump) to a nursing home. The names of other bones summon memories of meeting her husband, Harry, and of their "polio honeymoon," during which she had to rush her raving and suddenly hostile bridegroom back home so his terrifying illness could be diagnosed. She also remembers a "Big Trip" to Europe, the discovery of some unexpected in-laws, and peas stolen at harvest time during the Depression. Throughout, the bones provide just the right structural underpinnings, holding Georgie's story together from inside the narrative. Presented in loose chronological order, each fragment of memory is fascinating in its own way, moving from childhood's elemental fears and discoveries to the conflicted joys and pains of adulthood. Itani deftly brings them together, dipping into the past to illuminate the present moment, building such emotional complexity that the novel's ending - both inevitable and surprising - is as subtle as it is wrenching. With this book, Itani joins a group of novelists who have chronicled quiet lives from start to finish, uncovering treasure in their dark corners: Carol Shields with "The Stone Diaries," Marilynne Robinson with "Gilead." As in these earlier novels, great events of history are less important, and less revelatory, than moments of private pain. Some of Georgie's own major events, like the sudden death of an infant son, are barely described; they seem too heartbreaking to recall fully, even though traces of them keep resurfacing. In contrast, some apparently small moments assume lyrical dimensions and significance, and here is where Itani's true gift lies. Georgie's life is defined by everyday detail that can be mundane or miraculous: the minutes spent watching her grandmother, who suffers from osteomyelitis, bandage her legs every morning; the day in late spring when, on an ordinary drive home, Georgie and her husband wander into the annual migration of snow geese: "Wave after wave, line after line, weaving and fluttering, down they flew, black wingtips flashing, white underbellies sinking to the dark earth of the fields." These carefully observed and beautifully described moments put flesh on the bones of Itani's plot and make the novel breathe. AS Georgie struggles across the ravine, she realizes she will not meet Queen Elizabeth, whom she calls "Lilibet, a kind of parallel life-mate" - a celebrated woman whose existence is rigidly divided between the public and the private. Georgie speculates on the common experiences of marriage, parenthood and loss that bind them together. The irony is that with all the people Georgie has loved, the one most likely to notice her disappearance is this stranger, Lilibet. There will be an empty seat at the luncheon; perhaps Prince Philip will even lean over and comment on the empty chair. The imagined absence (in fact, it would be surprising if the queen's staff didn't slip in a last-minute replacement) is a tidy validation of the idea that every subject in a kingdom, like every bone in a body, counts. We touch each other in ways no one expects. As Georgie's sister says back in their childhood, "every person in life gets a function," and Georgie's is to prove that every life is deeply felt. Susann Cokal, whose most recent novel is "Breath and Bones," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.