Like his first novel, Touch, The Lobster Kings showcases Alexi Zentner’s penchant for storytelling. Knopf Canada, 2014 Readers who learn that this novel is a retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy "King Lear" might expect the tale to distance readers, with the original story centuries old and memories of stilted
Excerpt from Reading Journal: Knopf Canada, 2014 Last night I finished reading All My Puny Sorrows, and when I woke up this morning, I was weeping. This doesn’t reveal how the book ended, because I read more than half of it last night, half-skimming the first half that
You might be tempted to call eight-year-old Egg Murakami enchanting or winsome. Even plucky or spirited. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 Each of these terms does reflect Egg in some sense. But such descriptions suggest something young-Oprah-heroine-esque about her. Egg’s character is too fully rounded to simply select the
Although I always have a small stack of books underway, I have carried to extremes this act of multi-booking this summer. Yesterday I finished Michael Crummey’s new novel (Sweetland), Alison Wearing’s memoir (Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter), Jan Zwicky’s poetry collection, the second volume in the Fruits Basket manga series,
Shani Mootoo sidles up to her story. Random House Canada, 2014 A novel like Padma Viswanathan’s The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is more openly preoccupied with questions of grief and loss. One like Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts explores family relationships and the passage of time in
