"The rain fell hard and unending on the roof. All the ghosts of ur were sleeping. The night was as dark as a whale's belly. She passed by swiftly, cried out softly; I wasn't listening, I couldn't have heard."Bram has a reluctant story to tell. Excavating common objects from the mullock heap of a failed housing estate, he records the lives of those who lived there. One-eyed Michael, fencing contractor and ideologue, his daughter Jodie, Slug the real estate agent, Layland from the Ministry and Tony the bricklayer-in-waiting: these are just some of the players in a laconic comedy of circumstance.Prize-winning short fiction writer Wayne Macauley has made, as Peter Craven has noted, 'something almost like allegory.' His compulsive telling ensnares us in an escalating series of remarkable events. An old leather satchel holds the documents for the fatal vessel of the title.A beguilingly simple, eccentric and original novel, "Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe" is a fable of ownership, and an elegy for a dream.