Friends I Never Knew by Tanya Lester (gynergy) is an ambitious but less successful first work of fiction. The premise is challenging: a burnt-out feminist organizer, recuperating abroad, pays homage to four women friends and colleagues by trying to write their lives from the fragmentary notes she has kept over the years. Only one of the stories is rock-solid: Juanita is a Guatemalan refugee whose harrowing story is well-crafted and utterly convincing; the others are not nearly as well-imagined, and seem to be still in early draft. A very rough book overall, but one that still leaves an imprint—in this case, a trace of the women's movement as a real thing, extending into and out of Winnipeg, across borders geographic and temporal.