How many people, after having fallen two dozen yards onto brick from the deck of a docked ship, would be able to get up and walk away before finally collapsing? Maud Stamp would, and that's only the first of many signs of cold determination she displays in The Crossing, Andrew Miller's quietly elegant novel. It's also one of the qualities that Tim Rathbone, who attended the same English university as Maud, is attracted to. They're an odd pair: Maud the middle-class daughter of schoolteachers, Tim the son of parents who land their private jet at the family estate. Odder still, the tattoo on Maud's forearm broadcasts her attitude toward life: sauve qui peut--every man for himself.
Tim and Maud become lovers and have a daughter they name Zoe. While Tim is content to be a stay-at-home father who writes concertos named after liver enzymes and plays his expensive guitars, Maud becomes a clinical research associate for a lab that's testing a powerful analgesic. She's no less rigid since their union, but her calm is tested after an unforeseen tragedy prompts her to take a solo voyage on the couple's boat across the Channel toward France. The beauty of this subtle novel is that it derives enormous power from small details, such as the discovery of a heart-shaped hair clip, and Maud's encounters with children on a distant island. "Everything changes," she tells the children, and one lesson of this wise story is that inflexibility can have profound consequences. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer