Thomas Wharton's Icefields (1995) Readers will recognize quickly whether there is a match to be made between them and Thomas Wharton's first novel. Ten pages should do it. First, there is the epigraph, from Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter: "As if everything in the world is the history of ice."
Louise Penny's Dead Cold (2006) Louise Penny's The Cruellest Month(2007) I plunged into Louise Penny's Gamache mysteries last October with the first in her series, Still Life. When I found books two and three nestled together on the library's paperback mysteries shelf, earlier this summer, I felt like someone was
Doris McCarthy’s Ninety Years Wise Second Story Press, 2004 This is another book that I discovered thanks to Shelagh Rogers’ The Next Chapter. You know how sometimes you hear a name so many times and you keep meaning to investigate and then, suddenly, something happens and it shifts from a
Gordon j.h. Leeanders’ To Be Continued ECW Press, 2005 Read: Sitting at freshly-assembled dining-room table. Now we can seat 8 for a meal. Or one reader and one story collection. (It was a two-course read for me.) Warning: Even if you usually spread short story collections over time, you’ll be
Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (1986) McClelland & Stewart, 1997 In an early edition of Jane Urquhart’s debut novel, she credits a 1915 novel for having inspired her story: Julia E. Cruikshank’s Whirlpool Heights: The Dream-House on the Niagara River. It’s difficult to find a copy of Whirlpool Heights but, because
