To read the Globe's review of the books listed here, click on the title.
THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO
By Steven Galloway, Knopf Canada, 261 pages, $29.95
In 1992, cellist Vedran Smailovic witnesses the deaths of 22 people by mortar shell. The following day he puts on his tuxedo, sits with his cello in the crater left by the explosion and begins to play. He does this for 22 days. This portrayal of living in the despair of the present, but with an unkillable knowledge that things can be otherwise, connects Galloway's characters and his novel with the legacy of the cellist. Steven Hayward
LITTLE BROTHER
By Cory Doctorow, Tor, 382 pages, $19.95
In the very near future, high-schooler Marcus Yallow is walking with friends in San Francisco when a 9/11-sized terrorist attack occurs blocks away. Everyone around is secretly abducted by the Department of Homeland Security. If you read only one SF novel this year, make it this one: a coming-of-age, political-awakening and sweet-but-hip love story. Spider Robinson
COCKROACH
By Rawi Hage, Anansi, 312 pages, $29.95
Montreal's Lebanese and Iranian communities as achingly experienced from beneath the belly of these underdogs. The unnamed narrator is a petty thief with a large and angry imagination. Hage's writing is hyper-energized by the indignities of immigrant experience, the existential anxieties of the second half of the 20th century, a righteous indignation as old as the prophets, and ink-black humour. T.F. Rigelhof
THE MAN GAME
By Lee Henderson, Viking Canada, 513 pages, $32
A young man stumbles upon a secret sport in this epic tale of pioneer Vancouver. The parallel historical narrative is populated by a grizzled crew who spout a foul-mouthed, distinctly Canadian dialect, their lives brightened only by vice and violence. This is the sort of sprawling, innovative, exhilarating yet quintessentially Canadian novel many of us have been waiting for. An absolute triumph. Pasha Malla
THE FLYING TROUTMANS
By Miriam Toews, Knopf Canada, 274 pages, $32
The heart of the book is an automotive road journey made by Hattie, Thebes and Logan to find Cherkis, the kids' dad. The novel is rich in dialogue, sometimes zany, sometimes stunningly sad, always character-true. Toews is an extraordinarily gifted writer, with unsentimental compassion for her people and an honest understanding of their past, the tectonic shifts of their present and variables of their future. Gale Zoë Garnett
GOOD TO A FAULT
By Marina Endicott, Freehand Books, 372 pages, $25.95
A car crash causes Clara Purdy's solid sense of everyday morality to soar beyond previous experiences. Until the accident, she has been living a small, quiet and affluent life, but "in a state of mild despair." Marina Endicott is a sweet-natured but sharp-eyed and quick-tongued social observer in the Jane Austen-Barbara Pym-Anne Tyler tradition, who can wring love, revulsion and hilarity in a single page. T.F. Rigelhof
BLACKSTRAP HAWCO
Said to be About a Newfoundland Family, by Kenneth J. Harvey, Random House Canada, 829 pages, $34.95
Harvey's novel is a complete portrait of Newfoundland, as it has been and will be. His mastery of an almost limitless array of techniques anchors this novel firmly in our time. He has created and portrayed something unique, from the morbidly grotesque scenes of ship's passage by early settlers to the numbed and numbing consciousness of the sealers, from alcoholism and abuse to ongoing poverty. Michel Basilières
RED DOG, RED DOG
By Patrick Lane, McClelland & Stewart, 332 pages, $32.99
One of Canada's foremost poets sets his debut novel in the Okanagan Valley during a fateful few weeks in 1958. Tom and Eddy Stark are brothers with a painful past and secrets to keep. Lane's craftsmanship is exquisite, particularly his unerring instinct for images that wound and enlighten in equal measure, bright shards of a broken mirror. Matt Kavanagh
THE GREAT KAROO
By Fred Stenson, Doubleday, 480 pages, $32.95
Stenson has produced another outstanding historical novel, a masterly work about Canada's involvement in the Boer War. It is subtly subversive not for its postcolonial attitude toward British imperialism, but because it plays down leading figures such as the legendary Sam Steele. And it's significant because it discovers and illuminates a lost chapter of Canadian history. Ken McGoogan
FALLING
By Anne Simpson, McClelland & Stewart, 318 pages, $32.99
