MADELEINE Thien's debut novel opens with the arresting scene of an ordinary moment in a relationship. Ansel, a pulmonary specialist, wakes up and reaches for the warm form of his partner Gail across the sheets. Then he remembers, again, that she died of pneumonia more than a year ago. The opening scenes are filled with Ansel's aching loss and over the following chapters we learn about the complicated emotional fissures that surrounded Gail's death.

Gail, a radio journalist specialising in soundscapes, had become obsessed with a diary kept by William Sullivan, a Canadian soldier held as a Japanese PoW in North Borneo during the second world war.

Written in code, the diary was discovered by his daughter; Gail manages with the help of a friend to crack it. The obvious metaphor is that cracking the code runs parallel to Gail's search to understand her father Matthew's tangled history, growing up on the island under Japanese occupation.

Born in Borneo before the Japanese invasion, Matthew's father collaborated with the enemy to protect his family.

Despite Matthew's trauma during the war, which included witnessing his father's execution, he feels forced to flee, leaving behind his childhood love Ani.

Matthew settles in Vancouver where he marries a Chinese immigrant, Clara, but is plagued by depression that Gail, his only daughter, struggles to comprehend. In the end, all these characters come to realise that some part of their lives will always remain broken.

Thien has a gift for beautifully shaped images that she uses, often to powerful effect, when describing different landscapes and periods. The scenes of Vancouver are delicately wrought, with descriptions of rain that "loses its inhibitions" or falls like a fine spray of mist.

Eventually, as in a soundscape that segues from one textual landscape into another, Thien weaves these disparate threads into a cohesive whole.

Although a compelling and thoughtful first novel, Certainty does suffer from an irksome style. At times the text feels overburdened with references to scientific facts and theories . . . the Mandelbrot set, Darwinism, neurology . . . that act as obvious cues to emotional triggers. Thien allows characters to dip once too often into their overflowing banks of childhood memories to slow down the narrative drive.

But these are probably just the marks of a first novel. One suspects that Thien's future work will pack an even more devastating emotional punch.