She is Maggie Coyle: recently downsized bank employee and single mom of Jonathan. He is Joe Farlotte: out-of-work architect and jilted dad of Holly. When the two first meet, Joe is reluctant to abandon his "compulsive simplifying" to meet the risks of intimacy head-on, and Maggie is torn between the divergent pulls of feminism and her own desires and expectations.

But when Maggie rescues Holly from depression, and Joe becomes for Jonathan the dad he's never had, a dance as old as time is set in motion.

Told elliptically in a host of quirky voices, this is a candid exploration of life and love in the suburbs at the turn of the century.

Gerald Lynch was born in Ireland, where he frequently visits, and grew up in Canada. Omphalos is his sixth book of fiction. In 2015 Signature Editions published Missing Children, his fifth, the novel that introduced Detective Kevin Beldon. These novels were preceded by Troutstream, Exotic Dancers, and two books of short stories, Kisbey and One’s Company. A Professor mainly of Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa (occasionally offering a seminar in contemporary Irish fiction), earlier this year Gerald published the co-edited Alice Munro's Miraculous Art: Critical Essays. He has edited a number of other books and published many short stories, essays, and reviews, and had his work translated into a number of languages. He has also authored two books of non-fiction, Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity and The One and the Many: Canadian Short Story Cycles. He has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the gold award for short fiction in Canada’s National Magazine Awards.

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