Young adult novels often seem under-populated. Like low-budget TV dramas, they feature two or three protagonists, a stripped-down set, empty streets, and a few stock characters in the background to prop up the plot. Many of them are about as satisfying as a jelly sandwich on white bread. When you’re in the hands of an artist like Winnipeg’s Martha Brooks, however, you know you’ll be stepping into a world richly peopled with three-dimensional characters of all generations – a world, moreover, that has solid earth underfoot, a changing sky overhead, a lively connection with nature, and several dimensions of time.

Brooks, an accomplished jazz singer as well as a novelist, has reaped a wealth of awards in her literary career, including the Mr. Christie’s, the Ruth Schwartz, and for the 2002 novel True Confessions of a Heartless Girl, the Governor General’s Award.

Her latest, Mistik Lake, once again set in Manitoba, is another winning exploration of a heartbroken teenager’s progress into womanhood. Odella, 17, and her younger sisters, Janelle, 12, and Sarah, 7, have been abandoned by their mother, who has run off to Iceland with a romantic filmmaker, leaving the girls behind with their affectionate but wounded architect father. The girls are sharply and endearingly individualized – as, indeed, is their reckless mother Sally, driven into despair by too many secrets and too much guilt left over from her own wild adolescence, marred by a fatal car accident in which she was the only survivor.

Through wittily observed detail and brilliantly revealing dialogue, Brooks makes all of her characters live, and that’s as true for the adults – Icelandic grandparents, rumpled fathers, sad women down on their luck – as it is for oafish adolescent males and the marvellously yearning, angry, lovely Odella.

The plot is driven by the corrosive power of family secrets. Even in the first chapter, we see the three children silently conspiring to hide their mother’s drinking from their father. Their beloved great-aunt Gloria too often keeps her distance, intent on concealing her lesbianism from hometown eyes. Gerald Isfeld, the gruff storekeeper at Mistik Lake, where Odella’s family has a cottage, has his own stifled knowledge to hide, until it explodes into the open at the novel’s denouement. Sally and her husband, Daniel, have equally damaging secrets from and with each other. But all this is handled with supreme restraint. The story’s moments of poignant emotion gain throat-aching force from their terse understatement. Brooks doesn’t have to tell us, for example, how hard seven-year-old Sarah is grieving after her mother leaves. She has only to show us Sarah stubbornly wearing her mother’s gift hat, mittens, and scarf indoors all Christmas Day, tears dripping onto her knees as she demands to phone Sally in Iceland.

The dramatic action of Mistik Lake is mostly in the past; what we see unfold is the emotional arc of the family as it comes to terms with that submerged history. Odella falls in love, gets a summer job, learns to understand and forgive her mother. The progression of the plot, as it moves from loss and anger through gradual understanding to an incandescent moment of reconciliation in the very last line, is silky smooth. The various pieces click together at last to make a surprising and deeply satisfying pattern. And although the story is told from the different vantage points of several characters, their voices are distinct enough that we never lose the thread.

Martha Brooks is notable also for her extremely rare ability to depict her characters’ sexuality with great vividness and tact. In Mistik Lake, as in True Confessions, Brooks makes us remember the first sensual ardour of youth, and drenches it in all the tenderness and sweetness we wish it always had. Her male characters, young and old, are notable for their believable and touching decency. Not only can she conjure young women in full enjoyment and control of their own bodies, but she can create male protagonists, like Jimmy, Odella’s boyfriend, who are both lovably sensitive and vigorously sensual.

Mistik Lake is a wonderfully absorbing read – you want to spend more time with even the minor characters, and the prose is so pure, the dialogue so sharp and funny, you’re carried along in perpetual pleasure. Like Barbara Kingsolver and Ursula LeGuin, Martha Brooks makes us emerge from her novels a little more in love with the world, a little more rueful about its follies, a little more hopeful about the possibilities of redemption. It will be astonishing, and deeply wrong, if Mistik Lake doesn’t win huge numbers of readers as well as its own swath of prizes and honours.