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.
