Nicholas Ruddock's The Parabolist Doubleday, 2010 It's ironic. One of the women in Nicholas Ruddock's novel is thinking about the heroines of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. "Look at all those passionate women, the ones in novels, the ones who wore their hearts on their sleeves," she says. "They all
James King's Étienne's Alphabet Cormorant Books, 2010 Stephen Chambers has been charged with the task of presenting Étienne Morneau's memoir. (I Googled him, but he is fictional; I fell for it book, spine, and thinker.) Morneau, himself, before he died, had tried for six months to write a conventional autobiography, but he
Rabindranath Maharaj's The Amazing Absorbing Boy Knopf, 2010 "Useless! Completely kissmeass useless nowhereian." That's how Uncle Boysie describes Samuel's father. "Your father was a big inventor in Trinidad, you know...[b]ut the only thing he invent was a scheme to get out of the island." But talk of his father's neemakararam
"We had to write three pages on our favourite season and I chose fall because of all the shimmery comic-book colours: a dazzling red dash here, a splash of yellow there, a sparkle of orange peeping out like Mayaro fireflies. In Mayaro, mostly everything was green. Here the
As if it wasn't enough to obsess about Reading and ReLi-ting, I'm also obsessing about the Toronto Book Award, whose shortlist was announced this week. THE 2011 TORONTO BOOK AWARD (More deets here.) What Disturbs Our Blood, James FitzGerald (Random House) Étienne's Alphabet, James King (Cormorant Books) The Amazing Absorbing
