New Today: Magnified World by Grace O’Connell

Much is made of the zircon stones used by the protagonist’s mother in Magnified World (Random House Canada) in order to kill herself. She fills her pockets with them, then wades into the Don River, weighted down like some new age Canadian Virginia Woolf.

Her daughter, 23-year-old Maggie, is left bereft and ill-prepared to cope, despite the fact that, after the death, Maggie opens the family’s