Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe is a novel that is often like a short story collection--it begins with a family of Macedonian-Canadians, the Traicheffs. One son stays in a working class suburb of Toronto, driving a cab while he tries to decide what to do with his life. His brother marries a middle-class Iowan and takes to writing sports for the Waterloo paper. He writes about hockey, the Canadian national game, which has also emigrated. And Tracey writes about the players on the team and their coaches and fans, about the kids the brothers knew in school, and about the music and movies they use as points of reference on their way to adulthood. I read it all at once, almost afraid to pause to look back at a book so undeniably real. Like life, perusal has no time outs.