Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Canadian Governor General's award-winning playwright and Fall on Your Knees (Knopf Canada, $27.99 ISBN 0 224 04484 2) is her first novel. With a plot as rich and extravagant as the Arabian Nights, this novel will bind your heart right down to the last page. MacDonald's epic is bleak but ultimately triumphant as it uncovers the unlovely secrets of a Cape Breton family: the Gaelic-speaking Scot, James Piper, his Lebanese Catholic child-bride, Materia, and their four invincible daughters, Kathleen, Mercedes, Frances and Lily. This is Dickens with poetry.