Anna Woods, the heroine of International Date Line, may well be the Canadian doppelganger to Britain’s Bridget Jones in this chatty, unpretentious debut novel by Dawn Howat. Poised on the cusp of her 30th year, and unlucky in love at home in Toronto, Anna has made the rash move of selling off her worldly possessions in order to rendezvous in Budapest with Jack, an unreliable American lover she has not seen in six years. Predictably, he does not show, forcing an adrift, nicotine-obsessed Anna to seek solace in the arms of a series of foreign nationals and to plunge helplessly into the terrifying unknown that is the Eastern European hair salon. Read more…