Kathleen Winter's Annabel House of Anansi, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, it’s impossible to imagine Kathleen Winter’s Annabel being set anywhere other than the landscape therein. “In Croyden Harbour human life came
Sarah Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party Thomas Allen, 2010 A lot of readers think of short stories like the crumbs on the cover image of Sarah Selecky’s stories: short stories are what’s left behind when a writer couldn’t make something whole out of an idea, couldn’t serve it
David Bergen's The Matter with Morris Harper Collins, 2010 You might have guessed that David Bergen's The Time in Between wasn't my favourite book from the Giller Prize shortlist of 2005. It wasn't that I disliked it, so much as I felt disconnected from it. It felt like a universal
Dear Giller Shortlist, Oh, how I used to wait for your five names. Before readers could tweet about you, I camped on your webpage and, with a book in hand, pounded the refresh button religiously with every page turn. (My tech-minded fella told me it could be harmful to strike
M.G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets (1994) Have you read M.G. Vassanji yet? I chose this one as part of my glimpse into a pocket of Canlit missed in 1994 but I was really just looking for an excuse to read more of his work, which I had intended to
