From my parents’ bed that night, Lévesque looked like a man—maybe the first man in CBC history—who had lost two countries at the same time.

Ascension, by Steven Galloway (Knopf) is the story of Salvo, a tightrope walker, and his life and family in and out of the American circus. Galloway deploys modest language and simple sentences, enlivened and emboldened by stellar subject matter: eac