Canadian writer Dennis Bock opens his debut novel with a startling image: "One morning towards the end of the summer they burned away my face, my little brother and I were playing on the bank of the river…" This sort of arrestingly direct statement, equally readable as a bitter accusation or as matter-of-fact reportage, crops up often in the story of Emiko Amai, one of The Ash Garden's interlinked protagonists. Ten years after she's orphaned and severely disfigured by the Hiroshima bomb, Amai is offered reconstructive surgery in America, where she later begins making documentary films about the atomic bombings. Her work eventually leads her into contact with Anton Böll, a expatriate German scientist who assisted with the Manhattan Project, and who went on to lecture around the country on the necessary evils of the atomic bomb. Bock travels back and forth in time, illuminating key points of his subjects' lives while glossing over others, but he begins and ends with Amai and Böll's attempts to face each other's convictions and needs. Garden is at its most realistic and compelling when they fail. Both characters have been tempered by their lifetimes of independence, determination, and introversion, and they face each other with suspicions and prejudices firmly intact. For the most part, Bock doesn't compromise the authenticity of their low-key confrontations with movie-of-the-week epiphanies or emotional reconciliations, and as a result, Garden is a strikingly universal and gently poignant story about history, personality, and incompatible belief systems. Bock does noticeably favor Amai: Her first-person narrative and extensive suffering are more powerful draws than the third-person descriptions of Böll, which depict him as sincere but cold, estranged from his dying wife, and long used to defensively screening out emotional accusations. But Bock gives him enough humanity to render him more than a straw-man target. In the process, the author achieves a sensitive balance that only comes apart at the end of the book, when he reveals an unlikely, convenient, and regrettably conventional connection between his protagonists. Up to that point, The Ash Garden reads like true history; afterward, it devolves into melodrama. Still, for a first-time novelist, it shows a great deal of future promise, even if it doesn't quite live up to its own promises.