Sandinista by Marie Jakober

It is a testament to the power of Marie Jakober's Sandinista, that I remember it so well, years after reading it for the first time. It made me miss a bus. I was visiting Alison Sinclair, in Calgary, at the time. Never good at navigating, my wanderings landed me in a fast food restaurant, about noon, where I settled down to read after reassuring myself that I knew which bus to catch, when, in order to get back to Alison's apartment that night. But I became so engrossed in Sandinista that I failed to look up until I finished the last page, hours later. I had not even noticed the young man sweeping up around me with a hopeful air of expectation that I might leave.

The magic of Sandinista lives in the weave of the very human lives that Jakober uses to tell the story of a painful time in history, with her usual gift for embedding people in the circumstances and setting of her novels.