The redoubtable Simon Van Booy has performed another small literary miracle. In fact, smallness matters exceptionally in his new novel.

Its protagonist – rather, its supporting actor – is a mouse.

Wait: Don’t turn away! As with all Van Booy’s work, “Sipsworth” gathers you in fast. It is a deep, moving and vibrant saga. While compact in scope, it gets a lot done and (somehow) never comes near its most obvious risk – sentimentality.

The novel’s arc is compressed into two short weeks, told in present tense. Following a sudden, tragic loss (at first unspecified), an 80-something widow, Helen Cartwright, moves from her life in Australia back to the humble English town of her girlhood, as her final act, “now that the business of life had been settled.”

Assuming her own end is imminent, Helen prepares for it in calm, calculated ways. Her world has flattened and bled out – like her spirit. And it’s to Van Booy’s immense powers of empathy and insight that we owe his unflinching clarity about the loneliness of aging: “Just as she had once been singled out for happiness, she was now an object of despair. But … such feelings were simply the conditions of old age. … For her as for others, a great storm was approaching. She could sense it swollen on the horizon, ready to burst. It would come and wash away even the most ordinary things, leaving no trace of what she felt had been hers.”

Yet a certain stubborn trait in Helen triggers a Rube Goldberg-like chain of marvelous events. “Over the past several months,” Van Booy writes, “Helen has become curious about what people throw away.” Late one night, she ventures out to investigate a neighbor’s curbside discards and finds a fish tank containing a familiar toy figure, a plastic deep-sea diver. Moved by the prompted memory of her son’s childhood, Helen struggles to haul the fish tank home in the cold rain. (Throughout the novel, Van Booy powerfully conveys the realities of both unforgiving English weather and of living in an old woman’s body and mind.) In her warming bath, “she ponders the deep sea diver she can now feel holding her entire life in place like an anchor dropped years ago and then forgotten. But for what purpose is she being held at the edge?”

The answer will, by degrees, transport us. It involves an extra, unwitting passenger in that discarded fish tank.

Carefully, Van Booy lays out Helen’s recollections of a loving marriage and family; she ponders their loss and “the cruel paradox of human existence – not that you die, but that all happiness eventually turns against you.” Her routines blur together: She dozes, watches television or listens to the radio, heats frozen food for dinner. (Van Booy always pays loving attention to food and to the consoling rhythms of an elderly person’s day.)

When, from within a box that had been in the tank, “a pair of tiny eyes and a pink nose appear from a hole,” Helen tries to decide how to dispose of the creature without – because of her nature and, we later learn, her vocation’s covenant – harming it. The mouse, eventually christened Sipsworth, is a steady, sensible being who behaves in perfectly normal, mouse-vetted ways and quickly ingratiates himself. Descriptions of the tiny fellow are a continuous delight, crisp and thoughtful. “He has an elegant, almost aristocratic face when the fur is groomed.” We also learn, pleasantly, a lot about mice. They are “expert listeners,” for example. Sipsworth, at first guardedly tolerated by Helen, soon becomes a trusting friend.

A superb posse of unlikely characters from the town joins Helen’s project to help care for her new boarder. These bonds make idiosyncratic (therefore human) sense and kick up a bit of welcome comedy: Among the cast are a storekeeper, a librarian and her son, and a canny, worldly surgeon.

When a couple of emergencies activate Helen’s previously camouflaged identity, she is forced to rally. She reminds herself in one frightened moment to calm down and breathe; “when the jaw is relaxed, the tongue can go limp. Her hands stop shaking. Her vision sharpens and Helen can feel her mind emerging from the haze of her advanced age, like Excalibur from the lake.”

Van Booy’s writing is trenchant and beautiful. Countless passages beguile and move us while pulling no punches. On Helen’s radio: “A group of people have blown up another group of people; an iceberg is melting faster than experts had hoped it would … an argument between countries about who can fish where has escalated to a standoff.” In Helen’s mind, “it is the same news over and over again, with the only difference being that people think they’re hearing it for the first time.”

But the novel’s quiet heart is, like Helen and her friends, valiant. Readers will be moved by the affinities struck between humans and non-humans in these pages. Thornton Wilder once observed, “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” If I were asked to distill “Sipsworth” (and Van Booy’s whole extraordinary oeuvre) into a single line, that might be the one. Fortunately, I don’t have to: The work speaks for itself.

Joan Frank’s latest books are “Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading” and the novel “Juniper Street.”

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