While wonderful novels about the black immigrant experience are not uncommon in Canada, few novelists, black or white, have written about the country’s long-settled black communities. First-time novelist Lori Lansens – a white screenwriter living in Toronto – does so passionately with Rush Home Road.

Lansens’ saga opens in a trailer park near Chatham, in southwestern Ontario, where we first meet Addy Shadd, an ailing, elderly black woman. From the outside, hers has been a lonely, sad life. At 15 she was raped, then shunned by her parents after her brother died attempting to avenge the wrong. Heavily pregnant, Addy set out on a lifelong journey away from the fictional all-black town of Rusholme, Ontario, once a place of refuge on the Underground Railroad. Over half a century later, in the 1970s, a white neighbour dumps her mixed-race daughter, Sharla, on Addy’s doorstep and vanishes. The neglected five-year-old and the awesomely functional old woman connect.

Addy is a marvellous character, her matter-of-fact courage anchored in the same faith in human decency – despite abundant evidence to the contrary – that led her forbears to seek freedom. Lansens is even-handed in portioning out moral responsibility; she neither sanctifies the black community nor vilifies the white. The savage depiction of post-industrial squalour among low-income whites is especially moving and detailed.

Addy worries that her time as Sharla’s protector is running out as her long life replays in vivid waking dreams she cannot hold back: haven in Detroit, her baby stillborn, marriage, a daughter, then more tragedy. Lansens interweaves the past and present cinematically, with both narrative lines holding the reader rapt. She does occasionally fall under the spell of her extensive research and fails to blend a historical incident smoothly into the story, but these instances are rare. Rush Home Road is a compulsively readable book that leaves us feeling we know more about a time and a place – and about humankind – than when we opened the cover.