CANADIAN FICTION
BANG CRUNCH
By Neil Smith, Knopf Canada, 240 pages, $29.95
The opening of this debut collection's amazing first story appears to be trademark Neil Smith, a combination of comedy and tragedy, the essence of human life. The range of subjects is wide, from science to art to acting to education and much more, but at the heart of all the stories is the human condition and its infinite variety. Smith seems able to write about anything with flair and sympathy.
Candace Fertile
THE BOOK OF NEGROES
By Lawrence Hill, HarperCollins, 486 pages, $34.95
Hill has written a stunning historical novel that is at once moving, lyrical and shocking, a dazzling neo-slave narrative that spans three continents and blends known events and characters with necessary fictions. The Book of Negroes is a masterpiece, daring and impressive in its geographic, historical and human reach, convincing in its narrative art and detail, necessary for imagining the real beyond the traces left by history.
Winfried Siemerling
YSABEL
By Guy Gavriel Kay, Penguin Canada, 417 pages, $34
There are many writers who have shown us the gods walking among us, the age-old stories alive in the modern world. Rare are those able to demonstrate that those gods, those stories, live within us and are as essential to our existence as oxygen. Guy Gavriel Kay is one of those rare few, and Ysabel is a splendid addition to his body of work.
Robert Wiersema
THE END OF THE ALPHABET
By C. S. Richardson, Doubleday Canada, 139 pages, $25
When Ambrose Zephyr's doctor diagnoses a fatal condition that will "kill him within a month," he and his wife set off to visit places he has loved or longed to see. This is a very difficult book to put down, even when the final page is turned. Richardson not only has an interesting story to tell, he writes with such visual and emotional density that the end of one reading readily becomes the start of another.
T. F. Rigelhof
HELPLESS
By Barbara Gowdy, HarperCollins, 306 pages, $32.95
A surprisingly sympathetic unfulfilled pedophile stalks and kidnaps a young girl from her struggling single mother. Gowdy has the subtle talent of being able to transform objects into subjects, to bring the far-off so close that we have to work hard to distinguish between it and us. Hers is a peacemaking genius, unique in its talent for the translation of strangeness to second nature, repulsiveness to sorrow and insane to ordinary.
Lydia Millet
EFFIGY
By Alissa York, Random House Canada, 429 pages, $32.95
The exquisite detail in Alissa York's novel transports readers to 19th-century Utah, to the ranch of a polygamous Mormon family where seething tensions do not remain below the surface. Apart from the sense of historical reality in daily life and the specialties of taxidermy and silkworms, York gives glimpses into the story of the Mormons and brings together the various strands of narrative, letters and dreams in a compelling conclusion.
Candace Fertile
DIVISADERO
By Michael Ondaatje, McClelland & Stewart, 275 pages, $34.99
Ondaatje's unique gift is that his stories perform an inexorable seduction, impossible to resist. His novel Divisadero , which has just won the Governor-General's Award for fiction, shows how devastating the truth and its consequences can be. For all that it is elegant and erudite, it is also a breathtaking tango of violence, "raw truth." The story of a California family, broken apart by one astonishing act of violence, is mingled with that of an elusive French writer.
Aritha van Herk
BOTTLE ROCKET HEARTS
By Zoe Whittall, Cormorant, 189 pages, $19.95
Zoe Whittall might just possibly be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler staked out the moral terrain that would define and shape his work. The robust and beautiful idea that the pursuit of happiness is elastic, immense, that it cannot be reduced to any fixed system that fits everyone took Richler three novels to get to. Zoe Whittall gets it right from the get-go.
T. F. Rigelhof
THE OUTLANDER
By Gil Adamson, Anansi, 388 pages, $29.95
Adamson's novel, set in 1903, is the story is of a young murderess running from the vengeful brothers of the husband she has killed. She has escaped not only the murder charge and the prison that her marriage was becoming, but also the death of her first child. Whom to trust is a central question, how to trust equally important. Gil Adamson's prose hovers above the Earth, poetic enough not to land, but feeding off the grit.
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
THE ASSASSIN'S SONG
By M. G. Vassanji, Doubleday Canada, 318 pages, $34.95
The story centres on a Sufi shrine in India that refuses to recognize distinctions between Muslims and Hindus, and on the young man who forsakes his family legacy as the shrine's divine leader. The novel also feels timeless, partly because of the vast history it spans, from 1260, when a Muslim mystic arrives mysteriously in Gujarat, to 2002, when sectarian violence wrecks his ancient shrine.
Donna Bailey Nurse
THE ARCHITECTS ARE HERE
By Michael Winter, Viking Canada, 371 pages, $34
This flamboyant gem is so wide-angled and crowded with dramatic incident that it's likely to stretch even an unusually generous reader's literate mind and loving heart beyond normal limits. This is an intense, textured, tangled love story in which several triangular relationships intersect at sharp and odd angles. This puts Winter in the front rank of writers worth reading, no matter how daunting and inhospitable their terrain.
T. F. Rigelhof
LATE NIGHTS ON AIR
By Elizabeth Hay, McClelland & Stewart, 364 pages, $32.99
Set in the Northwest Territories in the mid-1970s, the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner has three settings: a little radio station in Yellowknife; a larger, in some ways metaphorical northern world, brought into focus by the Mackenzie Pipeline Inquiry hearings conducted by Justice Thomas Berger; and, in the final third of the book, the Barrens, the route for a 500-mile, six-week canoe trip undertaken by four of Hay's characters.
Marian Botsford Fraser
LAUCHLIN OF THE BAD HEART
By D. R. MacDonald, HarperCollins, 361 pages, $34.95
The story is told through the eyes of Lauchlin MacLean, a boxer washed up by a heart condition, who was born and bred and lives in the fictional community of St. Aubin, Cape Breton. It paints a deft and sympathetic portrait of the sometimes painfully tight bonds in a closely knit community, and does this while building suspense in a clever and ultimately satisfying way. It is a rich and enjoyable reading experience.
Leo McKay Jr.
THE CULPRITS
By Robert Hough, Random House Canada, 303 pages, $34.95
A love triangle featuring a Canadian computer-operator drone, a mail-order Russian bride and a Dagestani Lothario broken by Russian security forces, who suspect he is a Chechen terrorist. Hough brings to his fiction an attentive regard for human nature and empathy for the plight of regular folk, whether their trials are as enormous as societal meltdown or as small as struggles with happiness.
Charles Foran
THE FROZEN THAMES
By Helen Humphreys, McClelland & Stewart, 186 pages, $24.99
There are 40 stories and vignettes, one for each of the 40 times the Thames froze over between 1142 and 1895. Eight hundred and fifty years is a huge span of time, but Humphreys covers it elegantly; each story, with the year as its title, gives us a new character, in a new setting. A splendid book, full of memorable and vivid imagery.
Kate Pullinger
OCTOBER
By Richard B. Wright, HarperCollins. 241 pages. $32.95
The narrator, 74-year-old James Hillyer, flies to England to see his daughter, who is dying from breast cancer. In London, he runs into Gabriel Fontaine, his companion and sexual rival in 1944, when they were both visiting the Gaspé for the summer. Gabriel, also dying, asks James to accompany him to a suicide clinic in Switzerland. Wright never overreaches, and his fidelity to the emotions of his characters is what gives this book its power.
Joan Thomas
THE LOST HIGHWAY
By David Adams Richards, Random House, 393 pages, $34.95
Alex Chapman returns to the Miramichi after 10 years of teaching ethics and looking for meaning in life. When he learns that his great-uncle is unknowingly in possession of a winning $13-million lottery ticket, Alex sets out to steal the fortune. His ambition and greed, combined with a lack of moral compass, soon give way to murderous intent and actions. This is an exhilarating work of suspense that also explores religious and secular uncertainty.
Stephen Clare
RADIANCE
By Shaena Lambert, Random House Canada, 323 pages, $32.95
Radiance begins with a group waiting for a girl to get off an airplane on Long Island. The time is March, 1952, and the girl is Keiko Kitigawa, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing who, after corrective surgery, is to become a poster child for anti-nuclear protests. Keiko is a splendid creation. Lambert has fully imagined the time and the place and the people. She writes with wonderful authority and audacity about a time she isn't old enough to have lived through.
Richard Bausch
FAULT LINES
By Nancy Huston, McArthur & Company, 329 pages, $29.95
A multigenerational saga set against the major upheavals of the past century, but not a sentimental journey through middle-aged angst. Rather, this inventive, tough and technically brilliant novel tracks the psychologically crippling effect of tearing up cultural and genealogical roots. It does so backward from the present to the savage upheaval of the Second World War, and it does so through the eyes of four different six-year-old protagonists.
Michel Basilières
BIG MAN COMING DOWN
THE ROAD
By Brad Smith, Penguin Canada, 357 pages, $25
When ruthless, self-made man Everett Eastman dies, his will leaves each of his children one of the Eastman companies, but each bequest comes with a rat's nest of codicils. Smith documents, with sly good humour and bite, the ways conflicting views on the environment, global capitalism and female-male relationships get played out in the Ontario heartland - a world view under-represented in mainstream Canadian fiction since the death of Matt Cohen.
T. F. Rigelhof
GARCÍA'S HEART
By Liam Durcan, McClelland & Stewart, 378 pages, $32.99
García is a Honduran neurologist who was mentor to Patrick Lazarenko, the book's protagonist. When García is accused of aiding the Honduran army in interrogations in the 1980s, Lazarenko is asked if some medical explanation might be found for this moral failing. Durcan takes us to the nub of the neuroscientific conception of the self, the tenability of our ideas of free will and individual responsibility, when genes for almost every element of "personality" have been identified.
Kevin Patterson
STORMY WEATHER
By Paulette Jiles, HarperCollins, 342 pages, $31.50
The rich background of dust storms and despair, oil-well speculation and horse racing makes Stormy Weather powerfully compelling. Left on their own when the no-good Jack Stoddard dies, his wife and three daughters return to their last possible refuge, the mother's old home, a broken-down farm in Depression-era Texas. Despite being abjectly poor, the Stoddard women are resourceful and determined, women who can manage without men.
Aritha van Herk
GLASS VOICES
By Carol Bruneau, Cormorant, 311 pages, $22.95
Set 52 years after, and intertwined with, the 1917 Halifax Explosion, Glass Voices loops back and forth through time to reveal the life of Lucy Caine. Bruneau is a gifted storyteller, and the sense of place and time in the book is remarkable. This novel is rich in detail and emotion, and its density submerges the reader in a complete world of character, plot and setting.
Candace Fertile
THE NINE LIVES
OF CHARLOTTE TAYLOR
The First Woman Settler of the Miramichi
By Sally Armstrong, Random House Canada, 397 pages, $34.95
The title character is based on Armstrong's great-great-great-grandmother. Charlotte Taylor, a well-born Englishwoman, fled Sussex in 1775 with her lover. After he perished, she made her way to northern New Brunswick, where she outlived three husbands, gave birth to 10 children, enjoyed a lifelong relationship with a Mi'kmaq man and died in 1841. Armstrong has done a brilliant job in bringing her ancestor vividly to life.
Charlotte Gray
THE GUM THIEF
By Douglas Coupland, Random House Canada, 275 pages, $32
Coupland hits his clever stride with a built-in storyline mocking his critics, himself and the literary establishment, through a novel-within-a-novel penned by a vodka-soaked 43-year-old misanthropic Staples employee named Roger. In the fake novel, Steve is a writer and head of the English department at a prestigious university. The novel wrapped around the fake one is in the form of written exchanges between Roger and Bethany, a mid-twenties Goth who works with him.
Zoe Whittall
FRIEND OF THE DEVIL
By Peter Robinson, McClelland & Stewart, 365 pages, $34.99
After 19 novels, Robinson just keeps getting better. This one harks back to Aftermath (2001), about a Bernardo-like couple who kidnapped, tortured and killed girls. The husband died, and the wife survived a suicide attempt. Now there are suggestions she might have returned. As well, a 19-year-old girl has been raped and murdered. DCI Alan Banks is in charge, while DI Annie Cabbot tries to sort out her own troubling sex life.
Natasha Cooper
FOREIGN FICTION
MOTHERS AND SONS
By Colm Tóibín, McClelland & Stewart, 256 pages, $29.99
Many stories in this collection about mothers and sons are set in the stifling County Wexford of the author's youth. Tóibín treats his characters with enormous subtlety: Not a single clichéd Irish mammy can be found here; the mothers are a memorably varied crew. Tóibín combines emotional indeterminacies with sharp dialogue and strong storytelling in a deeply satisfying and memorable read.
Emma Donoghue
BE NEAR ME
By Andrew O'Hagen, McClelland & Stewart, 278 pages, $32.99
David Anderton is an Oxford-educated, middle-aged Catholic priest, abruptly posted to a small, bleak parish in Scotland. His parishioners include skateboarding teenage yobs and insightful, protective women who understand his spiritual malaise. An exquisitely written, profound portrait of ambiguity by a formidable and witty stylist who never puts a foot wrong.
Sarah Sheard
THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION
By Michael Chabon, HarperCollins, 411 pages, $33.95
Millions of Jews live in Alaska after the Holocaust and Israel's failure to achieve statehood in 1948. Chabon's alternative universe is a riff on hardboiled detective fiction, but also a radical reworking of history, a screwball comedy, a exploration of the soul and a political statement. Superbly brash, inventive, funny and melancholic. (Chabon's second novel of the year, Gentlemen of the Road, about two Jewish horse thieves on the Silk Road during the 10th century, is also well worth your time.)
Cynthia Macdonald
ON CHESIL BEACH
By Ian McEwan, Knopf Canada, 170 pages, $27
It's 1962, and sex hasn't quite been invented yet in England. On their wedding night, Edward and Florence are both anxious. He is joyous at the fleshly prospect. She is disgusted by both thought and act. Written with McEwan's superb restraint, this cautionary tale treats desire as a form of ignorance: We may be bitten by what we wish for.
Michael Redhill
FALLING MAN
By Don DeLillo, Scribner, 246 pages, $32
DeLillo writes about the personal cost of public events. Here, it's the attacks of 9/11. The novel begins in the moments just after the catastrophe, then moves away from it, by months and then years, before returning to a point earlier than the novel's opening. The title indicates falls both political and personal. The tragic public events are backdrop to equally tragic personal events in the characters' lives. DeLillo's honesty is so searing that he finds no comforting meaning in either.
Richard Bausch
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 577 pages, $33.95
A massive, sprawling, romantic cauldron of a book from the late Chilean writer: a self-portrait of the artist, a history of his times, a cultural and political manifesto, a mystery novel and a game. The plot may be indescribable, but this is as brilliant, hilarious and profound as it is indulgent, pornographic and puerile. A lot of in-jokes, codes, references and acts of literary vengeance may go unnoticed, but its richness cannot be denied.
Michael Redhill
ARLINGTON PARK
By Rachel Cusk, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 248 pages, $32.95
Rachel Cusk bravely and brilliantly gives voice to the discontents of privileged women with happy children, beautiful homes and successful husbands. Her dissection of the war between the sexes suggests that with motherhood, biology does become destiny, toppling the precarious power balance between husband and wife. It is exhilarating when literary genes mutate to form something entirely new, as Cusk has done.
Donna Bailey Nurse
THE SHADOW CATCHER
By Marianne Wiggins, Simon & Schuster, 318 pages, $29.99
A challenging blend of fiction and non-fiction. Wiggins creates character Marianne Wiggins, whose The Shadow Catcher is being considered for a movie. The novel within the novel deals with famous photographer Edward Curtis (1868-1952), while the current timeline focuses on the Wiggins character and her father. In sentences that dazzle, the novel addresses some of life's big questions. A profoundly moving, exciting and engrossing work.
Candace Fertile
DAY
By A. L. Kennedy, Anansi, 280 pages, $29.95
A gorgeous, intense novel about passion and fellowship among a crew of young British airmen during the Second World War strategic bombing campaign against Germany. In her commitment to the past as a living thing, Kennedy deserves comparison to Pat Barker. Like Barker, she handles war and history with passionate intensity. Her past is as unfinished as the present; it hardly feels past. A deft and rich meditation on love, death, sex, friendship, hatred.
Peter Behrens
LIFE CLASS
By Pat Barker, Hamish Hamilton, 247 pages, $35
Barker goes back to before the period of her acclaimed Great War trilogy, to the run-up and the war's first year, experienced by a group of art-school students who even in peacetime were absorbed by the theme of doom and then respond in varied war to the unfolding catastrophe. The issues in this moving, chilling, deeply thoughtful novel remain very pertinent.
Alan Cumyn
EXIT GHOST
By Philip Roth, Viking Canada, 292 pages, $32.95
Nathan Zuckerman, whose starring debut was in The Ghost Writer as a 23-year-old, is now in his 70s, and ailing. Exit Ghost, so artfully constructed as to allow Roth room for an astonishing number of motifs, is a marvellous farewell to Nathan Zuckerman. It contains marvels of the writer's craft and the wisdom of a life lived. It revisits old battles and opens new fronts. And, as always in Roth, it has much to do with the relationship of the author to his work and life.
Guy Gavriel Kay
ANIMAL'S PEOPLE
By Indra Sinha, Simon & Schuster, 374 pages, $19.99
Deformed after a disaster modelled on the one in 1984 in Bhopal, India, when poison gas leaked from a Union Carbide-owned pesticide factory, Animal walks on all fours and lives caged by his deformity in a city full of poisons of various sorts. From one of the worst industrial accidents in history has emerged one of the year's best books. Haunting in its images, poetic in its voice and surprisingly comic in its vision - beauty from the mouth of a beast.
Anosh Irani
WHEN WE WERE BAD
By Charlotte Mendelson, Picador, 321 pages, $29.95
The tale of a kooky English Jewish family in extremis. Mendelson possesses vibrant powers of description, evoking people, places and things with striking, sensuous detail. Her language leaps off the page, nailing physicality and revealing what lies beneath. She is at her best with longing, thwarted desire and, of course, food. Witty, poignant, surprising and beautifully written.
Ami Sands Brodoff
RUN
By Ann Patchett, HarperCollins, 295 pages, $32.95
Although this novel is nothing like Patchett's beloved Bel Canto, fans of that novel will be anything but disappointed with this tale of an influential Boston family. In what is a devastating critique of the failures of both family and country, she articulates a profoundly satisfying fictional magic. Only a gifted imagination could steep this family brew so plausibly and gracefully.
Aritha van Herk
EXIT MUSIC
By Ian Rankin, Orion, 380 pages, $24.95
After 20 years and 17 novels, Detective Inspector John Rebus is retiring in this provocative and compelling send-off. Murdered Russians, plutocrats ambitious for Scottish independence and the creeping links between Scotland's "underworld" and the "overworld" of global politics make this perhaps Rebus's toughest case. And also Rankin's most intellectually and emotionally satisfying novel, and his most energetic and inventive.
T. F. Rigelhof
THE PESTHOUSE
By Jim Crace, Bond Street, 255 pages, $32.95
An inversion of the American Dream: Two people trek across a degraded, lawless America to the coast in hope of rescue. Bleak premise or no, Crace's distinctive marked rhythms, just one draft away from blank verse, are at odds with satire. He can't quite extinguish the joy that percolates through all his writing. In this oddly reassuring novel, all of the country is a pesthouse, where Americans are confined until the fever of consumption is fully spent.
Joan Thomas
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST
By Mohsin Hamid, Bond Street, 184 pages, $29.95
A young, Princeton-educated, formerly Wall-Street-employed Pakistani bends the ear of a U.S. visitor to Lahore about his life in the United States before and after Sept. 11, 2001 - for all 184 pages of this novel. One of the interlocutors in this one-sided conversation is carrying a hidden gun. It is a daring conceit which, thanks to Hamid's deft touch, is beautifully executed.
Patrick Lohier
THE COLLECTED STORIES
By Leonard Michaels, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 403 pages, $32.95
In the 1970s, Michaels, an American short-story writer in the same league as Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, wrote experimental, language-driven fiction, moving in the 1980s to an essayistic, open form. In the time before he died, in 2003, he turned more to character-driven, crystalline realism. On every page of this volume, there is a line worth quoting, and there is also plenty of admirably lewd sex.
Darryl Whetter
THE NATURE OF MONSTERS
By Clare Clark, Harcourt, 379 pages, $31.95
Scientific and medical theories can survive for several decades past their refutation. The author of The Great Stink, set in Victorian London, now turns to the 1700s to illustrate the persistence of fallacies, in novel about an ambitious apothecary who tries to experiment on two maids in his household. The book is a fascinating blend of history, horror and humour.
Christy Ann Conlin
ZEROVILLE
By Steve Erickson, Europa Editions, 329 pages, $18
Erickson breathes new life into the archetype of a hero's journey, with a cinéautistic film buff hero who goes to Hollywood and transforms his obsession by learning the virtues of discontinuity in film editing. Zeroville is not always easy, but it is brilliant and accessible; unconventional, but complete and satisfying.
Claire Cameron
POETRY
YESNO
By Dennis Lee, Anansi, 68 pages, $18.95
A short book of very short poems with a truly astonishing depth. Part of the project of this fiercely compact work, with its strangely swinging rhythms and chants, is the possibility that a new use of language might rewire our relationship with the world. Wild, brave, urgent poetry, not quite like anything else being written: singular, memorable, necessary.
Maggie Helwig
THE BIPLANE HOUSES
By Les Murray, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 99 pages, $28.95
This politically conservative, religious Australian may be the best poet in the English-speaking world. Any unevenness comes not because he is capable of writing badly, but because his poems are sometimes flecked with unexplained localisms, or are devoid of recognizable context. But this hardly matters: Murray's prosodic grammar is so kinetically and passionately charged that nouns and adjectives are transformed into verbs.
Fraser Sutherland
MUYBRIDGE'S HORSES
By Rob Winger, Nightwood, 200 pages, $16.95
One of the most impressive Canadian poetic debuts in years, a sustained, novel-like lyric meditation on Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer whose classic photo sequence of a horse's stride changed the world's understanding of movement. Read it once for the dramatic story of a man who ate lemons and maggoty cheese, once for the sweet phrasings and once again for the nuanced comment on the photograph as document. A remarkable achievement.
Sonnet L'Abbé
QUICK
By Anne Simpson, McClelland & Stewart, 109 pages, $17.99
This book about death, classical and modern, medical and spiritual, combines the irony and experimentalism of Anne Carson with the lushness of Anne Michaels, making Simpson our third great poetic Anne. Here, Simpson perfects work in a complex middle length to look at a linguistic experience from a variety of intersecting angles.
George Fetherling
ADAGIOS
Electra's Benison, by Judith Fitzgerald, Oberon, 64 pages, $16.95
In Adagios Quartet, a four-book cycle, Fitzgerald writes about one of the most dysfunctional families in literary history, that of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and their unfortunate children. In this third book, the story of Electra, the poet's tonal virtuosity is measured, structured, flowing from one mood to another, illustrating the difference between Electra and her brother Orestes. It's a complex and endlessly generous work.
Paul Vermeersch
NON-FICTION
A SECULAR AGE
By Charles Taylor, Harvard University press, 874 pages, $39.95
Though this essential Canadian intellectual may overstate the triumph of secularity, his huge and elegant work takes on the transformation of the world from 1500, when it was almost impossible not to believe in a Creator, to 2000, when religion was simply one choice on a menu of belief systems. He finds the answer in "exclusive humanism," which sees "no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing."
Donald Harman Akenson
THE FILM CLUB
A True Story of a Father and Son, by David Gilmour, Thomas Allen, 242 pages, $27.95
In this intimate and confessional (sometimes embarrassingly so) memoir, David Gilmour offers his dropout son Jesse freedom from school on condition the boy joins him in watching and discussing films. Also about writing and about women, the book challenges our notions of education, of productivity, of schools that fail to inspire. It is also a tender account of a parent's deep concern for his child.
Charles Wilkins
THE LONG MARCH
By Sun Shuyun, Doubleday, 270 pages, $34
An engrossing revisionist account of the epic 1934 trek by Chinese communists by a child of the Cultural Revolution. Sun creates a vivid sense of time and place and her engaging writing, with a strong Chinese flavour, lends authenticity and directness. Her moving account captures the anguish and horror of the march. Her interviews with women veterans are particularly affecting.
Diana Lary
THOMAS HARDY
The Time-Torn Man
By Claire Tomalin, Penguin/Viking, 486 pages, $27
Tomalin is a woman of letters reputed for seven biographies about literary and artistic men and women. You read her not just for information about cultural worthies of previous ages, but to experience her intellect and artistry. Tomalin treasures Hardy, wounds and all. His griefs are not the heart of her matter, but rather what he made of them in his fiction and especially his poetry, composed without pressure to compromise, bowdlerize or serialize.
Adele Freedman
THE 100-MILE DIET
A Year of Local Eating
By Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon, Random House Canada, 262 pages, $32.95
Vancouverites Smith and MacKinnon defy the global food industry, strike a chord for the environment and live an entire year nourished only by food produced within 100 miles of their home. Despite a tendency to moral hand-wringing, the book works not only as a recipe for new ways of consumption, but also in its personal reminiscences, many involving food, and its reminders of the power of reconnection with the Earth, one's community and oneself.
Charles Wilkins
ABOUT ALICE
By Calvin Trillin, Random House, 78 pages, $19.95
This brief, reflective and loving tribute by New Yorker writer Trillin to his late wife Alice - a writer and editor who featured in many of his stories - is a memorial and a love poem. It is also a comic poem, a warmly moving one that provokes chuckles, along with a bit of the damp-eye syndrome. The spirit of this memorial is more comic than anything else, and there is healing in that.
Patrick Watson
UNLIKELY UTOPIA
By Michael Adams, Viking Canada, 180 pages, $34
Pollster Michael Adams celebrates Canada as a model for its openness to multiculturalism. In his case for immigration, he provides a compelling set of studies and statistics, covering a broad range of issues and debates, all presented in his inimitable and easily accessible style. An optimistic snapshot that does the great service of reminding us how much is at stake, and how much has already been achieved (reviewed today on page D22).
Will Kymlicka
BLACK MASS
Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
By John Gray, Doubleday Canada, 243 pages, $29.95
In this steely-eyed, powerful, unhinging and insightful book, British thinker John Gray contends that disparate forms of modern utopianism - communism, Nazism, fundamentalism in the United States and the Middle East - are rooted in apocalyptic forms of Christianity. Secular utopias, he says, are "vehicles for religious myths," stemming from the delusion that history has meaning and direction.
David A. Wilson
GREEN CITY
People, Nature & Urban Places
By Mary Soderstrom, Véhicule Press, 244 pages, $22.95
This important and meticulously researched book explores the "green paradox," that although we love gardens and greenery, we pave over nature. From suburban sprawl in California to compromised savannahs in East Africa, this dizzying panorama is part academic study, part green guidebook and part enviro-travelogue. Issues of dealing with sewage and greenhouse gas are counterbalanced by a celebration of the universal joys of greenery.
Hadani Ditmars
A LIFE OF PICASSO
The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
By John Richardson, Knopf, 584 pages, $50
It was worth waiting 10 years for this third volume of John Richardson's magisterial life of Picasso. No less than his subject's, Richardson's personality illuminates every page, as he takes us through Paris years of art, women and society. If those years were triumphant, this biography is no less so.
Mary Ann Caws
JOURNALS
1952-2000
By Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., edited by Stephen Schlesinger and Andrew Schlesinger, Penguin Press, 892 pages, $48
An elegant, engaging and episodic account of the Washington insider's passage from 1952 to 2000, from the departure of Harry S. Truman to the arrival of George W. Bush. Schlesinger's journals are more political than personal. Much as they resonate with insight, anecdote, wit and gossip, they flow from the events of the day. Call them a historian's private history, wry, tart, ribald and occasionally devastating.
Andrew Cohen
THE UNEXPECTED WAR
Canada in Kandahar
By Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, Viking Canada, 348 pages, $35
The decision to send Canadian troops to Kandahar, Stein and Lang argue, has altered the image of its military from that of benign peacekeeper to a combat army. It will also shape Canadians' thinking about the country's role in the world for a generation. The book is at its finest in showing that Canada's deployment of troops was not the result of explicit pressure from Washington, but rather a programmed deference toward the United States.
Jennifer Welsh
MUSICOPHILIA
Tales of Music and the Brain
By Oliver Sacks, Knopf Canada, 381 pages, $34.95
In this collection of strange tales, neurologist and music lover Sacks looks at how accidents in the brain - aneurysms, strokes, birth conditions - can generate odd musical outcomes. The book features the same warmth and humanistic wisdom found in his other case-study works. Few scientists write as well; fewer still have the largeness of vision that allows him to be precise without being reductive.
Mark Kingwell
EMPEROR OF THE NORTH
Sir George Simpson and the Remarkable Story of the Hudson's Bay Company
By James Raffan, Phyllis Bruce/HarperCollins, 484 pages, $34.95
"An awful little stump of a man," but a fine book. Raffan's biography of the adventurous, mean-spirited and racist long-time governor of the Hudson's Bay Company is fine contextual history. The fetid straw of a despicable man is spun into a golden book.
Ken McGoogan
BEAVERBROOK
A Shattered Legacy
By Jacques Poitras, Goose Lane, 317 pages, $35
The dispute at Fredericton's Beaverbrook Art Gallery, in which the descendants of Lord Beaverbrook contested ownership of the collections he bestowed on the citizens of New Brunswick, is well and thoroughly told in a lively, dispassionate, balanced manner by Jacques Poitras. Above all, this is a morality tale told in an art gallery against the canvas of a declining empire.
Thomas Smart
THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE
A Tour of the World We Need
By Chris Turner, Random House Canada, 480 pages, $34.95
Dismayed by the planetary prospects for his baby daughter, Turner, with family, crisscrossed the globe in search of people living sustainably. The resulting book makes an overwhelming case for abundant, even limitless hope for humanity. A captivating travelogue marked by piquant observations and raw, emotional engagement with farmers, radicals, business people, activists and indigenous people the world over.
Evan Osenton
WHERE WAR LIVES
By Paul Watson, McClelland & Stewart, 384 pages, $34.99
For the past two decades, Canadian photographer and journalist Paul Watson has been reporting from some of the most dangerous places in the world: Eritrea, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. In this often disturbing book, he takes us on a whirlwind visit to those places where war lives, both literally and in his own troubled soul.
Scott Taylor
THE IAMBICS OF NEWFOUNDLAND
Notes from an Unknown Shore
By Robert Finch, Counterpoint, 270 pages, $29.95
American writer Robert Finch combines the best qualities of the portraitist, travel writer, naturalist, historian, cultural commentator and wide-eyed innocent to give us a shifting, contingent, fragmentary, but lucid and living and true picture of Newfoundland and Labrador as it was at the close of the last century. Finch has revised, revealed, deepened and broadened what I thought I knew of my own birthplace, and, consequently, the greater picture of the country in which I live.
Ken Babstock
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER
By Devra Davis, Basic Books, 505 pages, $33.50
Devra Davis's courageous and horrifying book - easily the most important science book of the year - will rob you of any lingering fantasies about the nobility of cancer fundraising campaigns and convince you that fraud and neglect have turned a 40-year-long medical war into a questionable $70-billion charade. This masterful book has shown us why we must begin rethinking cancer research and treatment now for our children's sake.
Andrew Nikiforuk
A RUSSIAN DIARY
By Anna Politkovskaya, translated by Arch Tait, Harvill Secker, 323 pages, $45.95
Shot dead outside her Moscow apartment last October, the fearless journalist was a obsessive opponent of Russian policy in Chechnya and a tireless chronicler of the desire of ordinary Russians for a democracy that still eludes them. There are accounts in her important journal of bullying in the army, cancellation of freedoms and, worst of all, the draining apathy that greets such enormities.
Timothy Phillips
THE WORLD WITHOUT US
By Alan Weisman, HarperCollins, 324 pages, $32
In asking us to imagine the world without human beings, Alan Weisman forces us to acknowledge our species' effects on the planet and shake us out of our passive dance of death. In elegantly detached prose, with the most up-to-date science, he explores with top scientists such questions as: What would happen without farms? If we vanish, would another primate take over? Would nuclear generators eventually stop generating? Would life come back to the oceans?
Alanna Mitchell
LEONARD WOOLF
A Biography
By Victoria Glendinning, McClelland & Stewart, 498 pages, $36.99
Glendinning has brought out, from behind the sun of Virginia Woolf, the moon of Leonard, a carapaced, darling curmudgeon with a gift for unconditional love, an astonishing capacity for work, and some wondrous contradictions to his nature. She has brought this admirable, principled and singularly appealing man exquisitely to life.
Sarah Sheard
FROM HARVEY RIVER
A Memoir of My Mother
and Her People
By Lorna Goodison, McClelland & Stewart, 279 pages, $29.99
Goodison writes of her mother: "She dipped her finger in sugar when I was born and rubbed it under my tongue to give me the gift of words." It is clearly this gift that enriches Goodison's memoir, its language often magically paying respect to "tribal" knowledge or wisdom, virtue and truth (independent of the temporal process), its story often inspired by an affection or admiration not only for place and family but for Jamaican Creole as well.
Keith Garebian
I'VE GOT A HOME
IN GLORY LAND
A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad
By Karolyn Smardz Frost, Thomas Allen, 450 pages, $36.95
In 1888, John Ross Robertson, editor of the Toronto Telegram, visited the modest home of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn on Eastern Avenue in Toronto. Almost a century later, Karolyn Smardz Frost found herself digging into what was left of the fragile foundation of that same small house and unearthed the remarkable story of these two escaped slaves, who fled the U.S. South in the 1830s and found their way to Canada. The book has just won the Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction.
Robin Breon
A MEMOIR OF FRIENDSHIP
The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard
Edited by Blanche Howard and Allison Howard, Viking Canada, 552 pages, $35
The correspondence between Howard and Shields is fascinating on many levels. Howard's letters were often rambling and expansive; Shields's were shorter, more cogent, but both were always lively and urgent. A Memoir of Friendship is a significant achievement and a landmark book. The two writers' collaboration underscores the fact that, as writers and mothers, they dispelled assumptions about how a writer's life is lived.
Joan Clark
INFIDEL
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Free Press,
350 pages, $32
The Somalia-born author of this autobiography is one of the most remarkable and significant public figures of our time. Propelled to world fame by the murder of Theo van Gogh, with whom she made a short film, Submission, about the systematic abuse of women that is sanctioned by Islam, she has remained dignified, modest and above all stalwart in her views.
Theodore Dalrymple
ONE CHILD AT A TIME
The Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators
By Julian Sher, Random House Canada, 327 pages, $34.95
Sher does a superb job of attacking the almost unbearable subject of child sexual abuse, by giving a voice to the victims and investigators who can't turn a blind eye, either by choice or conscience. One Child at a Time gives readers hope, a renewed sense of direction and purpose.
Samantha Wilson
SILENCE OF THE SONGBIRDS
How We are Losing the World's Songbirds and What We Can Do to Save Them
By Bridget Stutchbury, HarperCollins, 243 pages, $36.95
Stutchbury, a biology professor at York University who has been studying songbird migration for more than 20 years, charts their decline, pinpoints its various causes and suggests ways we can slow down the rate of the birds' disappearance. A thoroughly researched and elegantly written call to arms.
Wayne Grady
ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE
A Year of Food Life
By Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, HarperCollins, 370 pages, $33.95
Kingsolver and her family set out to become "locavores," people who eat principally the food they gather either from their own gardens or buy from the local area. The world Kingsolver wants to inhabit is a world of neighbours doing their best and telling each other their stories, not of marketers spinning jingles to consumers. A sweet and raucous welcome to a world of flavour, shared work and conversation.
William Bryant Logan
28
Stories of AIDS in Africa
By Stephanie Nolen, Knopf Canada, 408 pages, $34.95
Nolen is a gifted listener and storyteller. Out of hundreds of African friends, acquaintances and subjects, won over six years of reporting on the AIDS pandemic, Nolen has chosen to profile these 28. Her collection pays loving tribute to the people of Africa, and is so rich a portrait of humanity that it would stand up without AIDS as its buttress.
Melissa Fay Greene
RAISIN WINE
A Boyhood in a Different Muskoka
By James Bartleman, McClelland & Stewart, 260 pages, $29.99
Bartleman's charming memoir tells the story of his growing-up years in the village of Port Carling, Ont. It is the story of a boy whose ceaseless daydreaming and hunger for knowledge helped him to find a way out of a life of poverty to become a high-ranking diplomat and an award-winning author, and lieutenant-governor of Ontario.
Susan Coyne
A LONG WAY GONE
Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
By Ishmael Beah, Douglas & McIntyre, 226 pages, $26.95
This heartbreaking autobiography shows how an eight-year-old in Sierra Leone, who recited Shakespeare to please his elders, and formed a rap and dance band with his friends in the mining town where he grew up, became a murderous teenage killing machine, addicted to drugs and violence, yet later transformed himself into the articulate and sensitive writer he is today.
Lynne Jones
LOST GENIUS
The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick
By Kevin Bazzana, McClelland & Stewart, 383 pages, $36.99
Erwin Nyiregyhàzi (1903-1987) was in his own way a genius. In his splendidly researched biography, Bazzana shows how Nyiregyhàzi's super-dominating mother propelled him into a stunning, meteoric career, which was doomed to collapse quite rapidly. A fascinating and highly readable yarn that could lead to a posthumous resurrection of interest in Nyiregyhàzi's remarkable artistry.
Anton Kuerti
BLACKWATER
The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
By Jeremy Scahill, Nation Books, 452 pages, $32.50
Scahill brings the reader back to the origins of Blackwater in 1997 and its right-wing Christian, billionaire founder, Erik Prince. The terror attacks of 9/11 proved a bonanza for Prince. Since 2003, Blackwater has expanded rapidly, adding helicopters and aircraft and hiring foreign mercenaries. Scahill's page-turning collection of intrigue and insight into the underworld of privatized warfare is well researched, thoroughly documented and, as a result, extremely frightening.
Scott Taylor
POWER, FAITH, AND FANTASY
America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present
By Michel B. Oren, Norton, 778 pages, $43.50
Not only is Power, Faith and Fantasy an enjoyable read, from the Barbary pirates of the 18th century to Israel's maturity, but Oren's history is the essential underpinning of a bold assessment of the roots of U.S. Middle East policy and its profound influence on Washington's policy-making today. Oren's book provides a unique opportunity to understand, in a profound and nuanced way, why Americans act the way they do.
Michael Bell
GOD IS NOT GREAT
By Christopher Hitchens, McClelland & Stewart, 307 pages, $32.99
Hitchens works his way with glee through the catalogue of religion's egregiousness: the unverifiability of sacred texts; the frequent contradictions of religious law and lore; the bloody histories; the sexual repression; the intolerance of criticism or dissent; the mutually contradictory claims; its origin in our fear of death and darkness; its cult of simultaneous death and deliverance. All argued with the passionate eloquence of a true disbeliever.
Martin Levin
PRISONER OF TEHRAN
A Memoir
By Marina Nemat, Viking Canada, 276 pages, $34
Nemat is a Christian woman raised in Tehran. In 1982, at 16, she was taken by Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards to Evin, the political prison, where she was tortured and came within moments of execution. Her story was hidden for 25 years. Her family and friends didn't ask and she didn't tell. At last, she decided to write the truth. It is an act of bravery, this book, as well as of compassion.
Linda Spalding
THE SNORING BIRD
My Family's Journey Through A Century of Biology
By Bernd Heinrich, Ecco, 461 pages, $37.95
Heinrich leads us through his family's extraordinary history, which begins in Europe, ends in America and is shaped at every turn by the rise of the science of biology. With his usual warmth, grace and insight, Heinrich has created an unconventional memoir - equal parts father and son - that explores two radically different, often conflicting approaches to understanding the natural world. Importantly, The Snoring Bird reminds us that science itself evolves, and that scientists are a product of their time and culture.
Lindsay Borthwick
PATHS OF GLORY
The Life and Death of General James Wolfe
By Stephen Brumwell, McGill-Queen's University Press, 406 pages, $39.95
Brumwell vindicates Wolfe after a century or two of armchair debunking, and frees him from the fainting-away image of Benjamin West's famous painting of his death. If not a great general, he was a great soldier who cracked a tough nut: Quebec. This is an all-too-rare combination of first-rate, innovative scholarship and page-turning readability.
Roger Hall
MERLE'S DOOR
Lessons from a Freethinking Dog
By Ted Kerasote, Harcourt, 380 pages, $29.95
Merle's Door is a thoroughly researched, philosophical, sentimental and sometimes breathtaking book, and an adventure from beginning to end. Kerasote is engaging and enlightening, and Merle is certainly a likeable character. His master's anthropological and sociological observations are challenging, and his love for Merle undeniable. When Merle dies, Kerasote is inconsolable, and the ending is a work of art. Anyone - dog lover or not - will be deeply moved by the book's last few lines.
Diane Baker Mason
INVENTING ENGLISH
A Portable History
of the Language
By Seth Lerer, Columbia University Press, 305 pages, $28.95
Lerer's compact book is both erudite and accessible. He brings both love and rigour to his subject. Lerer is also a natural writer - neither looking for a folksy style, nor writing with pomposity or coy condescension. Inventing English will jog the memory, provide a clear sequence for English's journey and point you toward further information.
Gale Zoë Garnett
LEGACY OF ASHES
The History of the CIA
By Tim Weiner, Doubleday, 702 pages, $35.95
A magisterial book and a natural candidate for the Pulitzer Prize. It's smart, extensively researched, exceedingly well written and passionate. Weiner's study of the history of the Central Intelligence Agency is a blow-by-hammer-blow account of its misdeeds and failings under successive U.S. presidents since Harry S Truman. He concludes that maybe in a decade's time, the CIA will "rise from the ashes" and prove capable of seeing the world clearly and spying on its enemies.
Wesley Wark
WHOSE WAR IS IT?
How Canada Can Survive in the Post-9/11 World
By J. L. Granatstein, HarperCollins, 246 pages, $34.95
Granatstein makes a strong case that Canada needs and can achieve a traditional and realistic foreign policy, complete with a healthy inventory of military equipment - that good deeds and fine talk are not enough. In other words, the soft power of values is no substitute for the hard power of defence. Granatstein is never dull, and he starts here with a harrowing section imagining an earthquake levelling British Columbia at the same time as terrorists strike Toronto and Montreal.
Andrew Preston
THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF
Stories of Personal Triumph
From the Frontiers of Brain Science
By Norman Doidge, Viking, 427 pages, $31
You don't have to be a brain surgeon to read Doidge's book on "neuroplasticity": the capacity of that dynamic organ in your skull to repair and reorganize itself. Though primarily about people who suffered from brain damage, the insights that he reports can benefit all of us - anyone who has let any part of their mind go to seed. The prose is fluent and unassuming; we are not talked down to.
Jessica Warner
WITCH HUNTS
From Salem to Guantanamo Bay
By Robert Rapley, McGill-Queen's University Press, 311 pages, $34.95
Fears, ignorance and issues may vary through history, but Rapley persuades us that the basic characteristics of witch hunts persist from 16th century Europe through to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the Maher Arar affair. His book is masterful, chillingly clinical and gripping and shows how we cannot simply blame ephemeral demagogues, when petty bureaucrats can always be found to do their bidding.
Roger Morris
FATEFUL CHOICES
Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940-1941
By Ian Kershaw, Penguin Press, 624 pages, $43.50
Justly renowned for an outstanding life of Hitler, Kershaw now focuses in on 10 decisions in 19 crucial months of the Second World War: three German, two Japanese, two American, one British, one Italian and one Russian. Strikingly, the dictatorships and oligarchies were distinctly more incompetent than the democracies. This book is stimulating and a model of good history.
Margaret MacMillan
TO THE CASTLE AND BACK
By Václav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson, Knopf Canada, 383 pages, $34.95
The absurdist playwright who became a political dissident who became a head of state describes his memoirs as "a braided loaf of bread," composed of diary entries, presidential memos and answers to scripted questions. Though sometimes ill-tempered, Havel is always funny and revealing. He proves here that he was right to reject what he calls "the banal idea that everyone should stick to his own trade."
Barbara J. Falk
THE INVINCIBLE QUEST
The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon
By Conrad Black, McClelland & Stewart, 1,152 pages, $45
Nixon is a brooding ghost who inhabits a historical purgatory. Black's biography is alert to detail but unafraid of generality, and at its best on Nixon's recurrent crises. But the real payoff is in the fast-paced, wide-ranging account of the Nixon presidency, which compares favourably to any earlier renditions. No doubt, the author has drawn on his own experiences and boardroom politics.
Roger Morris
AT THE SHARP END
Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914-1919
By Tim Cook, Viking Canada, 600 pages, $40
The first of a two-volume set (the second comes out in 2008), Cook's book is unprecedented as an immensely readable and impeccably researched history of Canadian soldiers in the First World War. The best sections present the daily banalities of soldiering, including every imaginable soldiers' addiction, from cigarettes to the dice game Crown and Anchor.
Jonathan Vance
ABSTRACT PAINTING IN CANADA
By Roald Nasgaard, Douglas & McIntyre, 432 pages, $85
This beautiful book, gloriously free of any black-and-white images, emancipates us from the popular fallacy that abstract art was born in New York in the 1940s. Dating back in fact to the turn of the century, abstraction reached Canada in the 1920s, though only reaching a wide public in Quebec 20 years later. Though academic, Nasgaard sometimes discloses a poetic side.
Iris Nowell