Covering the works of Canadian authors Alistair Macleod, Michael Ondaatje, Jane Urquhart, Margaret Atwood and Drew Hayden Taylor, the author explores how the themes of memory, storytelling and identity develop in their fiction. For the narrative voices in these works, the past is embedded in the present and a wider cultural history is written over with personal significance. The act of storytelling shapes the characters' lives, allowing them to rewrite the past and be haunted by it. Storytelling becomes an existential act of everyday connection among ordinary people, and in daily (often unrecognized) acts of heroism.