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Intricately plotted and shimmering with originality, Nikolski charts the wondering and unexpected lessons of personal migration, and shows that they just might eventually lead us to home. Within the spring of 1989, three young people, born a large number of miles apart, each slash themselves adrift from their birthplaces and attempt to discover what - or who - might anchor them in their lives. Both leave almost anything behind, carrying with them only a few artefacts of these lives up to now - possessions that have proven so formative that they can not imagine surviving without them - but also the accumulated memory of their own lives and family histories. Noah, who was taught to read using road maps throughout a life of nomadic journeys with his mom - their house being truly a 1966 Bonneville station wagon with a gold truck - decides to leave the prairies for school in Montreal. But adding down roots there turns out to be a more transitory experience than he expected. Joyce, stifled by life in a remote village on Quebec's Lower North Shoreline, and her overbearing family, hitches a trip into Montreal, spurred on by the news story about a modern-day cyber-pirate and the nature of her own buccaneer ancestors. While her daily life remains surprisingly regular - working at a fish shop in Jean-Talon market, dumpster-diving at night for necessities - it's her Internet piracy profession that will take off. And then there's the unnamed narrator, whom we first meet clearing out his deceased mother's house on Montreal's South Shoreline and who chooses to move into the location to start a fresh life. There he discovers his true home among books, content to invest his days working in a used bookstore and journeying though the many worlds books open up for him. During the period of the next 10 years, Noah, Joyce and the unnamed bookseller will sometimes cross pathways, and sometimes narrowly miss one another, as they all pass through one vibrant neighbourhood on Montreal's Plateau. Their journeys appear remarkably unformed, more regularly guided by the prevailing winds than personal will, yet their reviews weave in and out of other wondrous tales - reviews about such things as fearsome feminine pirates, urban archaeologists, unforeseen floods, fish of most kinds, a strange book without a cover and a dysfunctional compass whose needle obstinately items to the remote Aleutian village of Nikolski. Which is in the marvelous accumulation of these details surrounding the edges of these lives that we begin to learn these individuals within a greater whole entire, and ultimately realize that anchors aren't by any means permanent, really; rather, they're designed to be hoisted up and kept in reserve until their durability is needed again.
