The Canadian border town of Varennes is full of characters vying for your attention. As elderly nursing home residents calmly consider their mortality, a trio of young girls is caught in the moments before their friendship changes forever. Pets and plants and wild animals have their own priorities. People are endowed with powers that come and go, they fall in and out of love and have complicated relationships with faith. In Kathryn Davis' new novel The Thin Place, they all exist on the slippery border between the spirit and physical worlds, exploring familiar terrain with eyes that are open but never naive.

The specifics of this story feel secondary to the way it is told. Davis envisions Varennes as a thoroughly modern town where the boundaries between thought and action and past and future are much less stable than we count on, and perhaps governed by fewer rules than we'd like. In prying up the edges of these things, she carefully explores our dependency on borders. Individual narratives are stirred up by poignant, perfect observations about life and nature, but Davis never preaches. While it's clear from the outset that her intention is to illustrate the connectivity of all things, this is in no way the simplistic conclusion that it might have been in lesser work.

Davis draws so many wonderful characters that the impulse to choose a favorite is unavoidable (but probably futile). There are Lorna, Sunny and Mees, stumbling arm-in-arm through their twelfth year; Piet Zeebrugge, serial husband; Helen Crockett, the obsessive manager of the Crokett Home for the Aged; Chloe Brock, Piet's half-hearted lover and mother to irrepressible cats; Billie Carpenter, at home in the church but unsure about God. There is Margaret, Mees' beloved dog, lichen that speaks a "repetitive and incantatory" language and a moose whose presence leads to a meditation on progress. Varennes is a place of blurred edges, as revealed in Lorna's thoughts during a sleep over one night at Sunny's house: "...even if you made it through the night, you had to eat Sunday breakfast with the whole Crockett family, which always included soft-boiled eggs that hadn't boiled long enough so you could see the string that may have grown up to be a chick if only you hadn't eaten it, and then you had to go to church and pretend to believe in God."

Her descriptions of the ties between people and animals are achingly perceptive at times, and Davis makes room in the book to endow the natural world with specific character. "In terms of consciousness," she writes, "corn isn't particularly evolved, endlessly preening itself for having once been used as legal tender in place of gold and silver. Like most feed crops it's fascist at heart, taking strength from numbers. It started out as grass. It doesn't know how to talk." We're treated to glimpses of characters' anticipated futures, but it's difficult to know whether to trust these predications. Luckily, the fluidity of space and situation means the reader doesn't have to decide what — or who — to believe. The Thin Place is a rich book, wise but not heavy-handed, and the uncertainty is both welcome and necessary.