Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 Emma Bovary and I have met before, but we were not long acquainted. I started to read Flaubert's novel in between high school and university, but I never finished it. Not even close, actually. When we last moved house, I
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
Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World Picador (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1990 Michael Cunningham forced my introduction to Virginia Woolf because I desperately wanted to read The Hours and, so, Mrs. Dalloway had to come first. The Hours has been a favourite contemporary novel ever since,
Keith Oatley's Therefore Choose Gooselane Editions, 2010 Therefore Choose is a tremendously accessible, memorable and relevant novel from Gooselane. If you've tried one of Keith Oatley's earlier novels (The Case of Emily V. published in 1993, A Natural History, published in 1998), you might think that a novel from him
Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You Alma Books, 2009 Here's something simple to begin with (because I'm having an inordinately hard time writing about Rosie Alison's debut novel): I am grateful. And that is because Victoria, of Eve's Alexandria, sent me her copy of The Very Thought of You
