Guy Vanderhaeghe's A Good Man McClelland & Stewart, 2011 Sebastian Barry has said that a good historical novel is about "retrieving the present moment".* That is true of Guy Vanderhaeghe's A Good Man. From the beautiful but austere cover art of the frontier, to the detailed descriptions of fort and
I carried this button with me even after I'd moved on to other Giller reading, thinking about AWE Wayne Johnston’s A World Elsewhere Knopf, 2011 Readers enter a world elsewhere, when Landish and Van meet on a bench at Princeton, in A World Elsewhere. They enter a fictional
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."
A quick glance at my bookshelves and you would think that Jane Urquhart is one of my favourite authors. I have all of her novels save one -- a couple of hardcovers purchased new -- but I have a habit of leaving them unfinished. Nonetheless, the themes she pursues in
Richard B. Wright's Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard Phyllis Bruce - Harper Collins, 2010 I was so annoyed with myself as a reader for not properly appreciating Richard Wright's October; I knew it was very well-done and it was simply my preternatural attachment to his earlier novel, Clara Callan, that interfered with
