Discovering Andrew Miller’s work, at this stage of his career, reminds me of the solid sense of anticipation that I felt upon reading Rupert Thomson’s Secrecy (2013). As authors of 8 and 11 novels respectively, I’m surprised that I hadn’t been tempted to read one of their books until
In which I read, while sitting in a café, in a library and in various TTC stations. While longer volumes, like Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx and Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, stay at home. Charles Quimper’s In Every Wave (2017; Trans. Guil Lefebvre, 2018) Narrated by
There are a lot of lonely characters in CanLit: just think about all that snow, how starkly a single shape stands out in relief against the “great northern woods and in the empty places of the earth”. (I’ve recently read Louis Hémon’s snow-soaked 1921 classic, Maria Chapdelaine, translated by
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall (1947) “It was a mystery story she had got out of the lending library for her father, and she was not fond of mystery stories. Nobody in them ever seems to feel sorry about murders, she had said.” How unfortunate that Lucia is
Much of September and October were occupied by reading books which appeared on prizelists and a few which I thought might appear there. Most of these I’ve already discussed (a quick way to locate them is through my Autumn 2018 Prizelists and Events page, which collects the relevant posts
