As Sarah Stonich's novel "The Ice Chorus" opens, we witness a middle-aged Canadian woman moving into an isolated cottage perched on a cliff overlooking Ireland's rugged west coast. The closest village is "strung between two churches -- a post office, a petrol station, six pubs, a grocery [and] a combined fishmonger/butcher ... " Immediately, readers will be as curious about the protagonist's back story as they are about the unfolding of future events. How did Lise Dupré end up alone in such a godforsaken locale?

Stonich, who lives in Minneapolis, has structured her ambitious and accomplished book around a series of nonchronological flashbacks. Her narrative shifts seamlessly from Ireland, to Mexico, to Toronto. At its core, the novel is more than a celebration of Lise's hard-won success in transforming her life -- it is a light-handed yet illuminating examination of the notion that the quality of a woman's personal relationships is a sure indication of her moral worth.

Lise's relationship with Stephen, her husband of 20 years, has been virtually nonexistent. A professor of archaeology, he is "perpetually preoccupied and unabashedly self-absorbed." Between caring for their only child, Adam, and fostering her husband's demanding career, Lise had abandoned her own career as a producer of documentary films. Instead, she has devoted years to philanthropic work for a Toronto film center.

Before arriving in Ireland, Lise had traveled to Mexico to be near Stephen and his work on the excavation of a Mayan ruin. It is there that she meets and falls in love with a gifted Welsh painter named Charles Lowan. As their relationship intensifies, Charlie asks her to marry him.

Lise seeks a period of solitude in which to work out her future and to revisit her past. At age 14 she had been traumatized upon discovering that her father had been unfaithful to her mother and was planning to leave her for the "other woman." Now, Lise flees to Ireland, and her months-long seclusion there seems to somewhat assuage her turmoil. "Her stride is more deliberate," observes Stonich, "her face more open. Most days she feels some command over her life, over her imagination." With time to reflect, Lise perceives that attached to any future with Charlie will be the inevitable toll one pays when a marriage dissolves. The emotional upheaval for 18-year-old Adam becomes her foremost concern.

The portrayals of Lise's relationships with Stephen, Charlie and Adam are perhaps the novel's best features. Stonich also offers readers a colorful cast of well-drawn minor characters, chief among them the Irishman Remy Connor, a local hardware man best remembered for having written 50,000 lines of continuous love poems to his wife.

Katherine Bailey also writes reviews for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She lives in Bloomington.