Timothy Findley's Spadework (2001) This is an author who has been particularly important to me. In that peculiar way in which someone with whom you have had virtually no contact can affect you more than people with whom you have spent years of your life. So I delayed reading his
Roma Tearne’s The Swimmer HarperPress-HarperCollins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Sometimes the placement of a book in your reading schedule can impact that book negatively; it might unfairly cast a light on shortcomings, either the reader’s or the storyteller’s. (I should have
Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love London: Faber & Faber, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Readers fall hard into Louise Doughty’s sixth novel. The emotional intensity in Whatever You Love is pervasive: even when the root of that intensity is character rather than
Catherine M.A. Wiebe’s Second Rising (1984) Blue Butterfly Books, 2009 Thanks to Melwyk, who bookchatted about this first novel in such a way (at The Indextrious Reader) that I simply had to follow up. And in the immediate way. Not in the still-lingering-on-the-TBR-list-years-later kind of way. (Not that there’s anything
Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage NeWest Press, 2007 Chlorine and sweat: Angie Abdou’s debut novel is soaked. And if you can’t abide the smell of either, you might not want to cozy up to the tale of Sadie and Digger. These two are splashing their way to the top, elite
