Eric McCormack is one of our most boldly original and entertaining writers, but despite a Governor General’s Award nomination for his 1997 novel First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (whose trip-off-the-tongue title was adapted from a 16th century polemic by Presbyterianism founder John Knox), he remains relatively unknown and unfêted. To be sure, the 12-year gap between his newest novel, Cloud, and his last, The Dutch Wife, hasn’t helped keep him at the forefront of readers’ minds. But another reason might be that, as our sole practitioner of what might be described as absurdist existential neo-Gothic fiction, he’s in a genre all by himself. Read more…
National Post
THE FLEDGLINGS
by David Homel
David Homel’s new novel is a story-within-a-story whose frame hangs on Joey Krueger, an ex-architect living in Connecticut who’s made a fortune with a series of businesses preying on peoples’ fears of environmental catastrophe. Read more…
WONDER
by Dominique Fortier
In London a mathematician sits on the cusp of a breakthrough in his theory of wave propagation as the smoke from a volcanic eruption that killed all but a single resident of faraway Martinique wafts overhead. A century later, two strangers communicate through the stones they arrange on the slopes of Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery. Read more…
THE CARTOGRAPHER OF NO MAN’S LAND
by P. S. DUFFY
Though a number of women have written novels about the First World War, including Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers and, more recently, Pat Barker in both her Regeneration trilogy and a pair of later novels, Life Class and Toby’s Room (its title a nod to Woolf’s Jacob’s Room), most have focused on the hurdles faced by shellshocked soldiers returning home. P. S. Duffy’s ambitious first novel, which divides its time between the Western Front circa 1917 and the fictional hamlet of Snag Harbour, Nova Scotia, distinguishes itself by venturing, literally, into the trenches and staging some of its most powerful moments there. Read more…
ROAD ENDS
by Mary Lawson
Mary Lawson is well known as the late-blooming, Canadian-born author of two bestselling books. Now, with a third novel, Road Ends, she can justifiably lay claim to an oeuvre as well as a personal geography. If Ontario west of Toronto is Munro country then the area northwest of New Liskeard and Cobalt—where the fictional towns of Struan and Crow Lake that appear in Lawson’s books are roughly located—may well end up being dubbed Lawson Country. Read more…
THE LUMINARIES
by Eleanor Catton
An Irish priest, a New Zealand banker, a Jewish newspaperman, a Norwegian commission merchant, a French legal clerk, a Chinese opium dealer, a Maori gemstone hunter, a Chinese goldsmith, a chemist, an hotelier, a shipping agent and a pimp—the latter all English—walk into a bar. Unless you’re Gary Kasparov, this probably doesn’t sound like the premise for a great joke. It turns out, however, to be the premise for a great second novel by a rising, Canadian-born literary star and the youngest novelist to make the Man Booker shortlist. Add to this a late-19th century setting during New Zealand’s gold rush and you’ve also got a reading experience unlikely to be sullied by readers’ preconceptions. Read more…
THE RESTORATION ARTIST
by Lewis DeSoto
Art’s redemptive qualities are at heart of Lewis DeSoto’s mid-1960s-set second novel about an expat Canadian painter living in France who becomes emotionally unmoored after the sudden death of his wife and son. In setting and mood, The Restoration Artist is a departure from DeSoto’s Man Booker long-listed debut A Blade of Grass, which took place in the author’s native South Africa amidst simmering Apartheid-era unrest. There’s violence here too, but it’s all in the past. Read more…
THE BALLAD OF JACOB PECK
by Debra Komar
Long before New Brunswick was a twinkle in Confederation’s eye, and almost two centuries before Shediac became home to the largest lobster sculpture in the world, the county’s nascent English/Acadian settlement was the site of a macabre murder. In January 1805, an ersatz preacher named Jacob Peck arrived in town. Before he left six weeks later, he’d used his Svengali-like powers to persuade a local farmer named Amos Babcock to murder his own sister in cold blood. Read more…
ARTFUL
by Ali Smith
Artful was originally a series of lectures delivered by Scottish novelist Ali Smith at Oxford University in the winter of 2012. Although the titles of the book’s four essayistic parts: “On Time” “On Form” “On Edge” and “On Offer and On Reflection” sound like standard academic exposition, their contents most assuredly aren’t. Read more…
THE CRIMES OF HECTOR TOMÁS
by Ian Colford
In his two books, Halifax native Ian Colford has made a habit of embracing vagueness. Evidence, his well-received 2008 collection of inter-connected short stories, was set in an unspecified “province,” while the tales themselves were narrated by a refugee of indeterminate Eastern European origin. Read more…
THE RED HOUSE
by Mark Haddon
British writer Mark Haddon was already an accomplished children’s author and artist when his first adult novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a murder-mystery told from the point of view of an autistic boy, made him the toast of the town. Curious was followed, confoundingly for some, with a book of poetry. Next came a novel, A Spot of Bother which, confoundingly for others, had the audacity to be merely good. Read more…
MAGNIFIED WORLD
by Grace O’Connell
The world magnified in Grace O’Connell’s debut novel is more like two: one geographic and one psychic, both intertwined. The most obvious of these is the novel’s setting on a small strip of Toronto’s Queen Street West, where the novel’s 23-year-old protagonist lives in an apartment above her mother’s new age curio shop opposite Trinity Bellwoods Park. Read more…