When we are young, many of us have a picture-perfect vision of the path our lives will take, but often circumstances and our own choices nudge us from our path.

		"THE MEMORY KEEPER?S DAUGHTER" By Kim Edwards Viking ($24.95)

So it is with the characters in the masterfully written debut novel by Kim Edwards, a University of Kentucky writing teacher. Edwards lived in Edgewood from 1992 to 1996, and much of the novel is set in Pittsburgh.

The book is a compelling story that explores universal themes: the secrets we harbor, even from those we love; our ability to rationalize all manner of lies; and our fear that there will always be something unknowable about the people we love most.

The book opens in 1964 in Lexington, Ky., where a handsome doctor, David Henry, and his young wife, Norah, await the birth of their first child.

Henry seems content but is not really at peace. He is embarrassed by his hardscrabble West Virginia upbringing and haunted by the death of his sister who died at 12 of a heart ailment.

Henry's grief over the memory of his sister drives the terrible decision he will make when Norah gives birth. It happens late at night, in the middle of a snowstorm when the bad weather forces Henry to perform the delivery. As it turns out, Norah is pregnant with twins; the first to be born is a boy, the second, a girl.

Henry realizes that his son is fine but his daugher has Down syndrome, a fact unknown to his wife who is under the influence of anesthesia. Knowing that fatal heart defects are among the symptoms of the condition, he gives the baby to his nurse, Caroline, instructing her to place the baby in an institution.

He then tells his wife, "I am so sorry. Our daughter died as she was born."

Appalled by conditions at the institution, Caroline flees with the baby to Pittsburgh, a city she knows as the place where Henry attended medical school. As she enters the city, one of its most gorgeous views becomes a gateway to her new life:

"She had emerged from the Fort Pitt tunnel onto the high bridge over the Monongahela River, emerald hills rising out of the river flats, the city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her, immediate, vivid, so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of her car."

The book follows the lives of these families in parallel as they unfold on the paths that Henry's lie has propelled them. Grief, guilt and deceit build an impenetrable wall between Henry and Norah, and eventually, Paul, their son; and the happiness that Caroline finds for herself and her daughter is shadowed by her complicity in Henry's transgression.

Edwards' novel is as much a page-turner as any airport novel, but her prose takes on the cadence of poetry as she vividly describes the landscapes her characters inhabit and the burdens they carry.

Yet Edwards never loses track of her well-paced story, which builds toward what the reader can only imagine will be an awful reckoning.