What is happening to Penelope Reade? Clever, proud, and now ninety-six, she was once the formidable second-generation owner of the Handworks textile shop in Saint Andrews. Now, all the time, she finds herself wool-gathering, mixing up times and places: did her son, Matthew, just arrive home for a visit from his job as a museum curator in Toronto, or is he still a small boy being cared for by his grandmother? Is this fabric in her hands an exhibition piece, or an old lady’s lap-rug? Why is the leftover turkey in the dishwasher, and the cutlery in the fridge?

Matthew’s life is also complicated, and his judgment occasionally questionable (an affair, a snafu with a museum artifact). It’s clear he’s going to have to stay in Saint Andrews and figure things out. But his attempts to handle this new era in his family’s life gracefully, including sorting through a house stuffed with family artifacts and art objects, leads to complexities as thick as the sweaters stuffed into the old shop workroom.

There couldn’t be a better moment than 2024 for the launch of Mark Blagrave’s third novel, Felt, out now from Cormorant Books. After all, we’re living in an era when the social fabric of New Brunswick is being continuously altered by an influx of N.B. expats leaving big-city lives to return home to the east coast. Blagrave–also a playwright, writer of short stories, and a former university professor with roots in both Ontario and southern New Brunswick–examines what happens when “home” appears unchanged on the surface, but in reality, its inner nature has shifted forever. Deftly spanning three generations of the Reade family in Charlotte County, Felt considers how we remember our past selves, the importance of place, and how art and family ties are defined by recollection and forgetting.

Penelope, whose good sense often burns bright enough to penetrate the thick fog of her dementia, is as complex and moving a character as Hagar Shipley in Margaret Laurence’s 1964 classic The Stone Angel. Matt, while less sympathetic—self-absorbed, indecisive, a bit of a pervert—is nevertheless all of us, grappling with the questions that any adult child of aging parents will inevitably face. As we meet Penelope’s mother, Thora, it becomes clear that the old family stories about her early years as a Norwegian immigrant in Charlotte County might not have been strictly accurate. Over the course of the novel, Penelope’s home and its contents come to resemble the corridors of Cicero’s Memory Palace.

Like Blagrave’s brilliant sophomore novel Lay Figures (2020), set in Saint John during the city’s visual arts heyday of the late 1930s, Felt works best when weaving a portrait of the places, people, and unique culture of southwestern New Brunswick: the hike to the top of Chamcook Mountain, the sardine plant in Blacks Harbour, inane CBC morning radio chatter, the charming shops and summer homes of Saint Andrews. Perhaps less crisp and incisive are the sequences dealing with Matt’s past love affairs with Amanda and Ingrid, which can feel two-dimensional. The narrative can also get carried away by Matt’s curatorial tendencies. (“Sorry. I am starting to sound like a catalog,” Matt acknowledges during one lengthy passage analyzing the design principles of his mother’s craft business. He’s not wrong.) Yet exploring how and why artists work is integral to the emotional tapestry of the novel, and it all hangs together beautifully as readers draw their own links between Penelope and Thora’s hand-crafted sweaters and felted purses, and Ingrid and Gina’s conceptually-convoluted modern dance performance.

Penelope’s memory loss, and Matt’s selective recall, also raise questions about what those of us with perfectly healthy brains nevertheless choose to forget. Memory, as Penelope’s lifelong friend Bernadette puts it, is less like a smooth fabric than it is “tangled skeins of wool.” It appears some skeins are destined to remain in knots: family secrets, false identities, and false memories run deeper than anyone can imagine.

Felt is a complex and beautiful work of local fiction: an examination of the art of losing, and the emotional and physical landscapes that shape creativity, love, and desire. Saving things, as the novel points out, “isn’t about being struck in the past…. It’s about looking forward—an act of faith that there will be a future, a time when a later version of us will take the stuff out and look at it again.” Felt, like all of Blagrave’s novels to date, is a text worth looking over more than once.