Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God McClelland & Stewart, 1966 Rachel Cameron's List of Problems: 1. Mother 2. Work 3. Loneliness 4. Manawaka life and last, but not least, 5. Rachel Cameron. Her mother is getting older, and she not only has heart problems, but a brilliant capacity for passive-aggressive
Banana Yoshimoto's Hardboiled and Hard Luck (1999) Trans. from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (2005) This is the last of Banana Yoshimoto's works that have been translated into English that I had to read; if it had been the first of her works that I'd read, I don't think I'd
Ethel Wilson's The Equations of Love Macmillan, 1952 When Melwyk said that she, too, only had this one Ethel Wilson left to read, we decided to read the two novellas published in Equations of Love together. You know how it is, when you are about to exhaust a favoured writer's
Nalo Hopkinson's The New Moon's Arms Warner, 2003 Last Sunday I mentioned Nalo Hopkinson's 2003 novel, The Salt Roads; today I've got her 2007 novel The New Moon's Arms on the book-brain. I finished reading it on the front porch on an exceptionally lovely summer afternoon, the sort which is
Joan Barfoot's Dancing in the Dark Macmillan, 1982 (not the image shown) When I re-read Abra earlier this month, I mentioned that it felt both quiet and revolutionary at the same time. The narrator's self-discovery is relayed through the filter of memory, and the bulk of the action is internal,
