In Margaret Gibson’s powerful first novel, a daughter’s poignant attempt to understand her dying father illuminates both their lives. Writer Maggie Glass watches her father fade into the murky realm of Alzheimer’s. To understand the man Timothy Glass was, Maggie pieces together fragments of his life, and, in doing so, gradually tells her own harrowing story. Spanning decades, the novel brilliantly interweaves the strands of a family’s past and present, vividly evoking an Ontario farm in the ’30s; the North African desert in wartime; a hospital in British Columbia, where a returning soldier’s dreams for the future alter irrevocably; Toronto in the ’50s, and in the decades that follow. Infused with startling imagery and with language that cuts straight to the bone of meaning, Opium Dreams is a moving and life-affirming novel from one of Canada’s most gifted writers.