In her lovely, elliptical memoir of family and loss, Patricia Hampl brings her late mother and father back to life — then gently lays them to rest again. ''Nothing is harder to grasp than the relentlessly modest life,'' she writes in The Florist's Daughter. Then she does just that, conjuring not just her parents' modesty but everything that was extraordinary and mysterious about them, from her astringent mother's sense of adventure to the late-in-life revelations of her mild-mannered father, a St. Paul florist who brought ''an aura of quiet, to the flowers he arranged.'' This beautiful bouquet of a book commemorates both. A-
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