Some may recognize Joan Silber's name from the controversial list of 2004 National Book Award finalists. With Rick Moody as chair of the fiction committee, all of the nominees were women centered in New York and most of the books were short-story collections.

All hell broke as loosely as it can over a literary prize that year because the work leaned toward "quirky" and "poetic" and "unknown."

		"THE SIZE OF THE WORLD" By Joan Silber Norton ($23.95)

Yet, those finalists introduced me to an array of women writers whom I now greatly admire, including Joan Silber, whose nominated book, a "circle" of short stories, "Ideas of Heaven," didn't win the prize.

Her beautifully subdued stories stretched from a Manhattan dance studio to Renaissance Italy to the Boxer Rebellion in China.

Five books later we have "The Size of the World," and it doesn't disappoint. Silber quietly and persistently wades through simultaneous time, constructing complicated narratives of overlapping characters, yet she remains quiet and powerful and in control of her story from beginning to end.

The book stretches from Arizona to Thailand to Mexico to Florida to Michigan to Italy to California to Vietnam and connects engineers, hippies, colonialists, natives, immigrants, businessmen, prostitutes, teachers, nurses, doctors, soldiers and Buddhist monks.

Each long chapter is named for its main character: Toby, Kit, Corinna, Mike, Annunziata, and Owen.

By lacing together all of these places and people, Silber's novel challenges the size of the world itself, showing it to be small and interconnected, yet gigantic and laced with misunderstandings between cultures and people who all have homesickness and doubts.

This is a contemplative and sad book. Hearts are broken; lives are lost; dreams both big and small go up in smoke; people are both dishonest and mean.

But Silber does not set out to judge her characters. This book is not a criticism of the Vietnam War, real estate speculation in Florida, tin mining in the jungles of Siam or the myriad infidelities that can surface between people.

More so, Silber marvels in the complexity of humans, how a piece of faulty equipment, a weak screw in an American bomber flying over Vietnam, can send ripples through the fabric of the world, touching nearly all of her characters and affecting their lives.

Owen (a young colonialist mining for tin in Siam in the 1920s, the salesman for the faulty screw, and the person who discovers its flaw in the 1960s) sums up the slow realization that ties all of her characters together through space and time:

"I had not been exceptional," he says. He says, "Screw the screw." He says, "No wonder they thought the world was flat."

In the end, the novel is about forgiveness, the ability to forgive oneself for not knowing more, for not knowing better, for not being able to see clearly the other side. Silber's concise language, inventive dialogue and far-reaching plot take on the world, and careful readers will see their place in it anew.