Readers might expect a retelling of the ancient Greek tale of Paris and Helen to be a bulky, wordy novel as useful for propping up a window on a hot summer day as for entertainment; but Jonatham Bennett's contemporary version of the story is a slim, polished novel that one would need to
One might say that Medicine Walk is a novel about the disconnect between a father and a son. McClelland & Stewart, 2014 “Eldon Starlight. Franklin Starlight. Four blunt syllables conjuring nothing. When he appeared the kid would watch him and whisper his name under his breath, waiting for
In the story, it is Joan who prolongs the name "with a certain tone of celebration". Penelope. But it's easy to imagine that it is actually Alice Munro who is savouring every syllable as she draws it out in ink. Pen-ell-oh-pee. You can imagine her there, à la Winslet and DiCaprio, at the
Nothing like a good mystery. Some serial fun, with Giles Blunt, Ian Hamilton, Louise Penny, or my most recent discovery, the Nina Borg series by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. But one can find a good page-turner in the standalone novels on the fiction shelves too. Take Claire Cameron's freshly published The Bear, longlisted
It's possible that the readers who will warm most fervently to The Wondrous Woo are those readers who feel a connection with a passage like this: Inanna Publications, 2013 "The first episode had come after an incident at the Woolco cafeteria when I was ten. It was $1.44
