Synopsis This collection of eleven linked stories dances the line between fiction and memoir, crystallizing moments from one woman’s life as she travels through childhood, marriage, and motherhood to the true love that sometimes comes after.

Each tale coalesces around a landscape, distinctly lush and evocative, where episodes from a life are transformed into moments of universal significance. In the title story, a child inhabits her own private realm within a maze of corridors and rooms in a hotel in Brazel where she comes to recognize the truth of what she has heard — even if it is a lion rumbling down the hallway in the night, even if her mother tells her it can’t possibly be so. In “The Blue of the Madrugada,” the girl grows into a wilful young woman and discovers the complexities of love by the light of blue candles. In “Taken for Delirium,” amid the revolving seasons and nature’s endless regeneration of the Ontario woods, the woman and her husband cope as their marriage falters. And in “The Still Point,” the young wife and mother, in a Mexican landscape mysterious with unexplained occurences, breaks free of her bonds.

The stories in the Lion in the Room Next Door test the boundaries of literary prose, unfolding like memory itself in sharply etched images. The narrative is potent with remembered pasts, fragments of myth and dream, and the magic within the mundane. As the heroine travels through exotic landscapes, she struggles to find her own way through the terrain of her heart.