What threw my friend was Remember Me's subject. "Why would anyone want to write about a bag lady?" she asked, disgust in her voice. My feeble response was, "Why not?" As I see it, every human life hides a story worth telling. Trezza Azzopardi obviously thinks so, too. She recognized this fact when she researched her book, inspired loosely by one Nora Bridle, a resident of the streets of Cardiff. Azzopardi moved her character to Norwich, where this young Welsh writer now makes her home.

Azzopardi captures 70 years of a woman's lost life, a life that would destroy most anyone, yet — in a strange way — its potent mixture of extremes also kept the protagonist of this tale alive. By now the sight of homeless men, women and even teenagers is no longer unusual in cities across the world. Perhaps not all of us can remember the first time we stepped over, or walked past, someone on a sidewalk. I can remember mine. It was in Paris, decades ago. There, bundles of humanity lay on top of the metal gratings to catch the warmth from the Paris Metro, huddled beneath newspapers that covered their faces and bodies. For a North American, this was a most unusual sight. Then, while living in London, there was the bag lady that used to spent the nights hiding from the elements in the doorways of our street with her shopping bags of belongings, and there was a sun-worshiping, heavily bearded tramp, who raised his hands to the heavens, repeating a mantra of now forgotten words.

Today, most towns and cities in North America have their share of street people. We see them, but we don't. We have learned to ignore their pleas for hand-outs, and we even step over them if they have chosen to lie in the middle of a sidewalk, covered by blanket or sleeping bag (if it is very cold). We are inured to their plight, and no longer give thought to whom or what they are or were. It is a matter of self-defence against a social condition that has no solution.

Years ago I had an assignment to write a story about a homeless woman, who need not have been homeless, but chose to live on the street. All attempts by family and social services could not stop her from repeatedly returning to the streets. It is then that I learned that there are as many reasons for being a street person as there are individuals. Each one has a different reason for being there. Some choose this way of life, some fall into it without wanting to, some have fallen through the cracks of the safety nets society provides. There is, of course, hidden, underlying, connection between all of the homeless people, just what we have so far failed to identify. They are, in part, the hermits of the Middle Ages, the anchorites; they often lack social skills required to live in community with others; some prefer to live an inner life that requires no contact with the outer world; some are mentally ill; some live in denial of a past life and have no vision of the future; some have been mistreated, but not all.

Azzopari's Pat/Lillian/Winnie — over time she has all of these names because others decide who she is to be: her parents, her grandfather, and a couple of exploitive spiritualists  — never really had a chance from the day she was born. A dysfunctional family, and hidden secrets that are only revealed to us and herself at the end of the tale, ensure that Winnie becomes what some school mates called her, a "Dirty Pikey."

That is a word unfamiliar to most North American readers. A pikey is a low life of some kind, even someone who indulges in eating hamburgers and french fries for a regular diet, and dresses sloppily. It may have come from some south eastern English dialect meaning a gypsy, and has now become a general slang term used as a put-down for anyone, who doesn't fit a particular image.

I am picking on this word because it is the one questionable term in a book that is otherwise well researched, and gives us a picture of Norwich as it was in 1930, the war years, and as it is today. I am not sure that pikey was in common use when Winnie was a child, and thus taunted by her schoolmates. All of the landmarks mentioned in the book are still there, though they have, as in all cities, changed over the years, for which Azzopardi makes allowances.

The book begins with old Winnie being robbed of her only possessions, which she kept in a box next to her in an abandoned house, where she had lately dossed down. The thief also took her wig under which she kept hidden her "tell-tale" red hair. The house turns out to have a strong connection to her past. It was a shoe store, where her mother once worked, and where in later years, Winnie herself met the less than savory Mr. Hewitt, who was more than just a cobbler making and repairing shoes. To Winnie, at age 15 with no ability to draw connections, Hewitt's back room, where she went at the urging of the clairvoyant's assistant, was "A room with an acrid smell, full of murder."

Having lost all, old Winnie leaves her hiding place and after being attacked by a dog, seeks help from one of the few people who have shown her kindness. But, most of all, the loss of her case forces her to confront reality. She must now examine her past and what led up to this moment of final loss of all that connects her to it.

Azzopardi, like a painter, sometimes produces scenes in multi-layered color, at other times they are like delicate washes, and then there are the sparse sketches that capture with a few, deft strokes an image with great vividness. This movement between sparseness and rich coloration propels the reader forward, and it soon becomes difficult to lay down the book. We are caught up in Winnie's life, or lack of it. Winnie takes us back to the past, with episodic glimpses into the present, which Azzopardi in a way, uses as the compass point that keeps us tied to the start of the journey of remembering. Remember Me is not just a reminder that we should perhaps remember that there is a story connected to every person we see on the street, but it is also Winnie who must remember who she was, who Pat was, who Lillian was and how she ended up being Winnie. She has to do it so she can finally, in old age, reclaim her life, not just her possessions.

In some ways, Azzopardi has created a fairytale with the usual wicked and good characters, with moral lessons, and whimsical moments that bring relief now and then from the harshness of the heroine's life. It is a novel written by a writer, who has the touch of the poet, the painter, and the investigating journalist. It makes for very good reading.

Azzopardi, whose first book was The Hiding Place, is the only writer whose debut novel has ever been short-listed for the Booker Prize. Hiding Place won the Geoffrey Faber memorial Prize, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

[Remember Me by Trezza Azzopardi, Key Porter Books, 262 pages, hardcover, $29.95]

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