To read the Globe's review of the books listed here, click on the title.
THE ALMOST ARCHER SISTERS
By Lisa Gabriele, Anchor Canada, 272 pages, $19.95
While her older sister Beth is living the dream in Manhattan, Peachy is sorting socks in a Belle River laundromat and looking after two little boys. Until the day she catches her husband having sex with Beth. Peachy decides to leave her sister in charge of the laundry and cooking and a little boy’s seizures and takes off for a weekend of shopping and dining in New York, including a blind date with the man Beth loves. Smart and funny. Joan Thomas
THE DISAPPEARED
By Kim Echlin, Hamish Hamilton Canada, 235 pages, $29
In 1979 Montreal, 16-year-old Anne Greaves falls in love with a Cambodian musician named Serey. Ten years later, she travels to Cambodia during a period of unrest, trying to track down her former lover. When she does find him, the reunion is not what she expects – nor is Cambodia itself. The book was nominated for the Scotiabank-Giller Prize. Charles Foran
FALL
By Colin McAdam, Hamish Hamilton Canada, 368 pages $32
Colin McAdam’s Giller-nominated second novel is set in a tony Ottawa boarding school 12 years in the past, and the subject matter conjures up ghosts of other novels with similar, rarefied settings and, to a lesser extent, plots. There’s a smattering of Lord of the Flies, more than a touch of A Separate Peace and an undercurrent of Catcher in the Rye, though McAdam writes for adults, not youth. William Kowalski
COME THOU TORTOISE
By Jessica Grant, Knopf Canada, 431 pages, $29.95
Audrey Flowers, the main character of this novel, is brilliant. She’s hilarious. I could read about her all day. The same goes for the tortoise. Oh, and the talking fruit fly. Come, Thou Tortoise is a somewhat sprawling but well structured comic novel with many serious messages and much marvellous insight. It’s extraordinary, original and simultaneously both deep and lightheartedly charming. Diane Baker Mason
|
All the lists |
THE COLOR OF LIGHTNING
By Paulette Jiles, HarperCollins, 350 pages, $22.95
The great horsemen of the Texas plains, the Comanche and the Kiowa, are inscrutable to the whites who slowly begin to encroach on their territory around the time of the American Civil War. With the war grinding to a close, the bureaucrats of Washington and Philadelphia decide that the time has come to herd the western Indians onto reservations. But what if these people do not wish be limited to a reservation? Aritha van Herk
THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD
By Terry Griggs, Biblioasis, 224 pages, $19.95
Chockablock with winks and digs at the literary set, Thought You Were Dead is a gleeful Russian doll of a novel. Reading it, one trips along, revelling in its wordplay, its wit, its puns and allusions, and its jokes. Then there are the characters: the inventors, writers, realtors and reputation-management specialists who people the antic “sleepy town” of Farclas, Ont. The story is equal parts comic murder mystery, hero’s journey and layered intellectual puzzle, and it satisfies on every level. Sally Cooper
THE FACTORY VOICE
By Jeanette Lynes, Coteau, 285 pages, $21
In The Factory Voice, set in the midst of the Second World War, Jeanette Lynes tells a rollicking good tale that shows regular ol’ Canadians making the best of the worst of times. It’s a fictional slice of Canadian history about a boxcar-manufacturing plant in Northern Ontario that won one of the biggest airplane commissions of the Second World War, the engineering pioneer who ran it, and the motley cast of players who were drawn there for guaranteed employment and shelter. Carla Lucchetta
