I first posted about Robert Hough's novel in a whirl, having read Dr. Brinkley's Tower in less than 24 hours, falling fast and fully into the story. I avoided specifics about the plot and the characters, because the wonder of this novel is rooted in the telling. House of Anansi,
It is a basic human need. “Our need to know where we come from, to connect it to who we are and where we’re going.” Harper Collins, 2012 Ruth becomes aware of this need, first, when she is six years old, but that is just the beginning. It
These stories turn on moments in which their characters are yanked from their everyday existences. That ordinary, day-to-day life? It's there, and the reader understands its dimensions, but the focus is elsewhere. "Hard, steady work, and no money in it either. When there was fish, there was no price for
One might think that writers of bookish books would go on and on, produce vast treatises on their love of books and literature, but many bookish books are slim volumes. Consider Carlos Maria Dominguez's The House of Paper (2004), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (1976; Trans.
Last summer, walking in Little Jamaica in Toronto, I picked up a copy of a community newspaper with a cover image of protesters overseas burning the cover of Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. HarperCollins, 2007 Book burning: it's a headline-grab alright. It certainly captured this reader's attention.
