BIOGRAPHY
AND MEMOIR
Giving Up the Ghost
By Hilary Mantel
HarperCollins, 246 pages, $39.95
Hilary Mantel is a distinguished British novelist, historian, critic and now memoirist. This remarkably told tale shifts effortlessly from childhood experience (Mantel's mother took up with the lodger after the Second World War; he became her stepfather) to adult meditation on mortality and childlessness: Mantel retells a medical nightmare of a badly and chronically misdiagnosed endometriosis. The book "is autobiography at its finest: elegantly crafted, emotionally raw. Her distress has turned to literature."
Reviewed by Mark Abley
The Last Honest Man:
Mordecai Richler,
An Oral Biography
By Michael Posner
McClelland & Stewart,
369 pages, $39.99
Done with the co-operation of the late great literary icon's widow, Michael Posner's oral biography -- featuring hundreds of interviews with Richler's family, friends, colleagues and critics -- is not a hagiography. There's plenty about Richler as writer, and his place in the canon, but the book is equally notable for "its full-bodied portrait of Richler as a friend and family man." "Reading The Last Honest Man is like being a bystander to spirited conversation and having the freedom to make up your mind for yourself about the merits of the subject and the reliability of the speakers."
Reviewed by T. F. Rigelhof
I'll Tell You a Secret:
A Memory of Seven Summers
By Anne Coleman
McClelland & Stewart,
235 pages, $29.99
In 1950, the 14-year-old Anne Coleman began a seven-year relationship with Montreal writer Hugh MacLennan, a long-time cottage neighbour who was 43 and married at the time. There was nothing sexual about the relationship except tension; the two would walk and talk, about literature, writing and life. "Her young self is exquisitely rendered, attending in an unusually pure voice to details of nature and the personalities she observes around her, faultlessly honest about her confused passion for this troubled man, and a writer of pages that slide like silk across the mind."
Reviewed by Sarah Sheard
Persepolis 2:
The Story of a Return
By Marjane Satrapi
Pantheon, 187 pages, $25.95
Iranian-born Marjane Satrapi, author/illustrator of the internationally acclaimed Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, has produced an equally marvellous sequel in Persepolis 2, joining the list of those who can both write and draw beautifully, a list that includes Art Spiegelman, Chester Brown, Chris Ware and Seth. Satrapi's autobiographies are illustrated with stark, lean drawings, married to funny, smart words. "Satrapi's book is powerful, not just because it's about the inability to go home again, but because she shows just how criminal it is to be forced to leave home to begin with."
Reviewed by Lisa Gabriele
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber:
A True Story of Bank Heists,
Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt
Smuggling, Moonlighting
Detectives, and Broken Hearts
By Julian Rubinstein
Little, Brown, 319 pages, $34.95
In 1986, Attila Ambrus hopped a freight train from Transylvania to Budapest, where he became a goalie on a hockey team, smuggled furs and skins from Romania to Germany, drank a great deal of Johnny Walker Red, and robbed a series of post offices and banks for a total of about $800,000 U.S. Eventually, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison -- and gained widespread support from a populace that regarded him as a Robin Hood figure. The book is "both hysterically funny and heartbreaking. . . . Ballad of the Whiskey Robber is sure to become an instant classic."
Reviewed by Chris Scott
Chronicles:
Volume One
By Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster, 293 pages, $35
This memoir of the troubadour known as the "spokesman for a generation" focuses mainly on what should be his most troubled times: when he was an indigent folksinger in frozen New York in the early 1960s; the aftermath of the 1966 motorcycle accident; his mid-1980s nadir as a writer and performer. Yet the message is generally positive, with lessons learned from the hard times. " Chronicles: Volume One is an unusual, refreshing and altogether winning memoir . . . and is a worthy addition to the Dylan canon."
Reviewed by Robert Wiersema
The Selected Journals
of L. M. Montgomery:
Volume V -- 1935-1942
Edited by Mary Rubio
and Elizabeth Waterston
Oxford University Press,
410 pages, $37.95
In this volume, Lucy Maud Montgomery is clearly unhappy and distressed, with her manic-depressive husband and with her two sons, who fail at careers and persist in "unsuitable" relationships with women. "The story of her writing life (the earlier part, at least) is the comic and joyful story of a Maritime Cinderella, who is wise enough to enchant the hearth instead of seeking the palace. The story of Maud's own life is a story of being swallowed up by the palace and buried in its dungeon."
Reviewed by Margaret Anne Doody
Colin's Big Thing
By Bruce Serafin
Ekstasis, 278 pages, $21.95
Bruce Serafin's memoir mostly takes place in the Vancouver he loves so much. He records the lives of average people working at dead-end jobs and raising families; some of the best material comes from his stint with a gang of misfits on the graveyard shift at the post office. He also portrays the darker side of Vancouver, where junkies and hookers feed addictions and squabble on the filthy sidewalks, but everything is told with compassion, humour and intelligence. "If you choose to read one book from this season's list, let it be Colin's Big Thing. This memoir is social realism at its finest."
Reviewed by Patricia Robertson
The Last Heathen:
Encounters with Ghosts
and Ancestors in Melanesia
By Charles Montgomery
Douglas & McIntyre,
314 pages, $24.95
In 1892, the Bishop of Tasmania sailed for Melanesia to rescue the natives from cannibalism and magic. More than a century later, his great grandson, Vancouver writer Charles Montgomery, followed the bishop's route through the South Pacific in search of the myths and spirits he had sought to destroy. Montgomery delivers a wonderfully complex tale filled with reportage, history and thoughtful musings about the corrosive effects of colonialism and imposed Christianity. Montgomery has created "from his journeys and jottings a script as delicate and impressively beautiful as any essay of exploration that I have read in recent years."
Reviewed by Simon Winchester
In the Shadow of No Towers
By Art Spiegelman
Pantheon, 42 pages, $27.95
Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist Art Spiegelman ( Maus) was living in lower Manhattan when the two towers of the World Trade Center burned and collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001. His daughter had just started school in the neighbourhood. This work is a memorial to that day, evoking the early comics he loves so much: The Katzenjammer Kids, Hans and Fritz; Upside-Downers; Little Nemo in Slumberland; Bringing up Father; Krazy Kat. "Spiegelman has drawn, coloured, compiled, collaged and written nothing short of a brilliant and black-humored ode to loss, and its fallout in both personal and political terms."
Reviewed by Bernice Eisenstein
The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll:
The Search for Dare Wright
By Jean Nathan
Henry Holt, 308 pages, $35.95
Dare Wright (1914-2001) was a fashion model and photographer, but her real job was keeping her eccentric artist mother happy. She led a bizarrely insular life as a child, separated from her brother and father until she was in her twenties, but deeply, almost exclusively, linked to her mother. In 1957, she published a children's book, The Lonely Doll, in which the doll of the title, Edith, falls in with a father-and-son family of bears; the two youngsters misbehave and Edith gets spanked by the father bear. The book is "a Pandora's toy box, at once voyeuristically compelling and utterly disturbing -- Grey Gardens meets The Secret Garden."
Reviewed by Lisa Godfrey
Walk to New York:
A Journey Out of the Wilds
of Canada
By Charles Wilkins
Viking Canada, 300 pages, $36
Charles Wilkins's 12th book is a day-by-day description of his 64-day, 2,200-kilometre, 2.5-million-step walk from Thunder Bay, Ont., to New York City. And not just of the journey, but also of his appearance, his mental and physical state, and his observations, questions and responses along the way. He tells the story -- or stories -- in a charming, self-deprecating way that is hard to resist. "This book restores honour and lustre to the word 'pedestrian,' which will never ever mean dull to me again."
Reviewed by Marian Botsford Fraser
No Man's River
By Farley Mowat
Key Porter, 355 pages, $36.95
Mowat's memoir is set in 1947, his first summer in the North. In it, he sets out the facts on which he based the fiction of his 1952 classic, People of the Deer. Much of the text is drawn from his journals, and from the journal of Charles Schweder, a half-Cree friend with whom Mowat canoed down the unexplored Big River to Hudson Bay. "Mowat's descriptions of the caribou, his prescient pet hawk, Windy, and his introduction to whitewater canoeing are as good as anything he has written. . . . [This is]a fine book from a masterful storyteller."
Reviewed by John Wilson
Living to Tell the Tale
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated by Edith Grossman
Knopf, 484 pages, $38.95
This first volume of a projected three-volume memoir by the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude takes us from his childhood in Aracataca, a lawless frontier town full of adventurers from all over the world, to his teenaged studies of Thomas Mann and Freud, to his career as an investigative journalist. If the next two volumes are the equal of this one, "they will record not only the life of a great artist, but the modern history of the country that nurtured him and also broke his heart."
Reviewed by Rosemary Sullivan
There is a Season:
A Memoir in a Garden
By Patrick Lane
McClelland & Stewart,
322 pages, $34.99
Since Patrick Lane is one of our leading poets, no one should be surprised that this is not a gardening book, but a richly poetic memoir about Lane's 45-year struggle with alcohol and drugs. Of course, the small garden in his Vancouver Island home is both a real and metaphoric one, a place of contemplation and creation and the source of healing. Lane's acceptance of his own human frailty makes this memoir universal, to be read "with long pauses to savour the beauty of the language and to reflect on its relevance for your own journey."
Reviewed by Freeman Patterson
Here Be Dragons:
Telling Tales of People,
Passion and Power
By Peter C. Newman
McClelland & Stewart/Douglas
Gibson, 733 pages, $37.99
The grand chronicler of the Canadian establishment this time tells his own story, of his escape from war-torn Europe at the age of 11, his years as a youthful dreamer in Toronto, his rise in the world of journalism and his career as a prolific recorder of Canadian social history. This massive work is packed with lively anecdotes and telling detail. " Here Be Dragons is a much more than worthy picture of ourselves, and a work of genuine wit and insight."
Reviewed by Rex Murphy
This Hour has Seven Decades
By Patrick Watson
McArthur & Company,
614 pages, $34.95
This memoir, by one of the brightest stars of the Canadian broadcasting firmament, begins with Watson growing up in Toronto in the 1930s and '40s, and takes the reader from the very beginnings of the Canadian television industry -- the memoirist dropped out of graduate school to hook up with the CBC as a children's broadcaster -- through his career as a documentary filmmaker, the years with the legendary show This Hour has Seven Days, his term as CBC chairman and his "second career" as a magician. "Intelligent, imaginative, daring, cocky and many-sided."
Reviewed by Kildare Dobbs
Wodehouse:
A Life
By Robert McCrum
Norton, 530 pages, $40
Will knowing the details of the fascinating and controversial life of the man who invented Jeeves and Bertie Wooster enhance or hurt your appreciation of that delightful pair? Not to mention Ukridge, Psmith, the Aunts, the Mulliners and the many oddly named and oddly behaved of the members of the Drones club. Do you want to know about Wodehouse's love life, involvement with the Nazis and compulsion to travel rather than settle? If you do, this book is for you. "This is a magisterial biography: disinterested, but never detached, and always intriguing."
Reviewed by Frank McCourt
Prisoners of the North
By Pierre Berton
Doubleday Canada,
327 pages, $39.95
Berton offers anecdote- and vignette-filled mini-biographies of five extraordinary people who were obsessed by or inextricably linked to the North: Joe Boyle, who followed the Gold Rush and got rich running a dredging business; Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who explored extensively, championed the Inuit and wrote nearly 40 books; Lady Jane Franklin, who dogged the Admiralty after the death of her husband, John, on his third expedition; explorer and writer John Hornby; and poet Robert Service. "Berton gives us a vivid picture of how the land can get under people's skin and become a potent driving force in their lives."
Reviewed by Peter Steele
The Mystery of Olga Chekhova:
Was Hitler's Favorite Actress
a Russian Spy?
By Antony Beevor
Viking, 300 pages, $36
Olga Chekhova, niece of the Russian playwright, fled to Germany during the revolutionary period, and became a film actor in Berlin. She also became Hitler's favourite film star, and appeared with him frequently at public functions. Beevor's thesis is that her brother, composer Lev Knipper, was a Soviet spy, and that she could have been one as well; in fact, that various Soviet intelligence agencies took an active interest in Anton Chekhov's many relatives. A "raffish and meaty family chronicle . . . piquant revelations in a tale layered with love affairs and exotic Mitteleuropean skullduggery."
Reviewed by Gerry Hopson
Isaiah Berlin:
Letters 1928-1946
Edited by Henry Hardy
Cambridge University Press,
755 pages, $63.50
Oxford University philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin was famously a great conversationalist and lecturer, but this volume of early letters, the first of a projected three, shows him to have excelled as a letter writer, as well. From a juvenile request for G. K. Chesterton to contribute to a school publication, to many loving letters to his parents, to sophisticated wartime dispatches from the United States and Russia, Shaya (as he often signed himself) wrote wonderful letters to the likes of Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, Noam Chomsky and Jackie Kennedy. "Most of us will never have the pleasure of receiving such fine letters . . . but this wonderful book allows us to read, with delight, over the shoulders of those who did."
Reviewed by Mark Kingwell
CULTURE
AND IDEAS
Rising Up and Rising Down
By William T. Vollman
McSweeney's Books,
seven volumes, 3,298 pages, $160
Also available in one volume
Ecco, 733 pages, $45.95
Vollman, best known as a prolific producer of postmodern fiction, spent more than two decades working on this colossus of a book (in every sense) that investigates the sources and causes of violence and attempts to establish under what conditions it might be justified. He consults not just philosophers and theologians, pacifists and activists, but tyrants and warlords as well. This brilliant, encyclopedic, profound work "speaks in the lyric voice of a humanist everyman, contemplating a problem of liberal history with considerable intelligence."
Reviewed by Christian Bök
Vermeer in Bosnia:
A Reader
By Lawrence Weschler
Pantheon, 412 pages, $37.95
The centre of this sterling collection of essays by the veteran New Yorker writer is three pieces that engage the tragedy of what was once Yugoslavia. In the title essay, Vermeer's qualities of peace and domestic and moral tranquillity are compared fruitfully with the daily brutality of life in Bosnia. Shakespeare's Henry V and Aristotle are also employed to telling effect. "Weschler is a rich, suggestive, highly visual, almost mystical writer. . . . [He]makes us look at things afresh, and think thoughts we have not thought before."
Reviewed by Gilbert Reid
Souvenir of Canada 2
By Douglas Coupland
Douglas & McIntyre,
144 pages, $29.95
Nobody understands the resonances and nuances of pop and disposable culture better than Douglas Coupland. His original Souvenir of Canada was a bestseller, and there's no drop-off of quality or interest in this second volume. Besides the author's often amusing observations, he provides something called Canada House, an abandoned house filled with uniquely Canadian objects. "Coupland is like an archeologist of everyday ephemera in this charmer of a book, sourcing everything from boxes of Nanaimo-bar mix . . . to public safety messages about marijuana grow ops."
Reviewed by Nora Young
The Meaning of Wife
By Anne Kingston
HarperCollins, 336 pages, $36.95
Anne Kingston's lively, fascinating social history of the subjugation of women in the marital bond also offers a number of compelling narratives of contemporary women striving to escape the legal "authority" of their husbands. Kingston's subjects include Princess Diana, who failed to free herself from her marriage, and Lorena Bobbitt, who took a kitchen knife to her husband's member to effect her escape. The Meaning of Wife raises important questions about the current state of relations between the sexes.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Simpson
Dark Age Ahead
By Jane Jacobs
Random House Canada,
241 pages, $29.95
Now in her late eighties, Jane Jacobs retains much of the visionary force that has made her one of the great thinkers on urban matters. Dark Age Ahead, written in Jacobs's trademark combination of forceful prose and scorn for "experts," is about the danger of forgetting who we are and where we've been. From the destruction of Mesopotamia through Europe's Dark Ages, "Jacobs moves rapidly into a spellbinding account of the forgetting and misplacing of shared values, assets and skills that she fears may lead the contemporary Western world into widespread social, economic and physical disaster."
Reviewed by Patrick Watson
Occidentalism:
The West in the Eyes
of its Enemies
By Ian Buruma
and Avishai Margalit
Penguin Press, 165 pages, $33
As a kind of reaction to the late Edward Said's idea of orientalism, which judges a society intellectually according to its reaction to the "other," these two distinguished writers not only show that there is a long history of anti-Western paranoia in the intellectual tradition of the "East," but that much of this is rooted in non-Muslim and non-Oriental thinking, that is, forms of Western self-hatred. Occidentalism "reminds us of how much the suicide of our own society has been advocated from within its own citadel, and of how reactionary and counter-humanistic such advocacy has been."
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens
Names of the Dead:
An Elegy for the Victims
of September 11
By Diane Schoemperlen
Viking Canada, 237 pages, $36
Diane Schoemperlen spent four months compiling a list of those who died on Sept. 11, 2001. That list alone was a powerful and moving document. But she went further, adding personal and familial details about as many of the victims as possible: engagements, anniversaries, the forthcoming births of children, lists of the things they carried, distinguishing features (including tattoos), the clothes they wore that day, their favourite books, their secrets. "I found this book irresistible. . . . It is the literary equivalent of sitting with the dead, a wrenching, confirming and ultimately consoling activity."
Reviewed by Katherine Ashenburg
Wisdom & Metaphor
By Jan Zwicky
Gaspereau, 132 pages, $31.95
The first thing you notice is how beautiful an object this book is. But Governor-General's Award-winning poet and critic Jan Zwicky is after other game as well: wisdom. To that end, she has marshalled "reflections, arguments, claims, aphorisms and ruminations on central themes: the nature of metaphor . . . vision and logic, truth and resonance . . . imagination, being, algebra, sickness, love, translation and tongues." She sets these reflections off with well-chosen thoughts from the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heraclitus, David Hume, Simone Weil, Konrad Lorenz and Wislawa Szymborska.
Reviewed by Karen Houle
Eats, Shoots & Leaves:
The Zero Tolerance Approach
to Punctuation
By Lynne Truss
Gotham, 209 pages, $26
One of the year's great surprises: a runaway bestseller about punctuation. Much of its success must be owing to the fact that Truss, a London editor, critic and novelist who has latterly become a language maven on the BBC, is such a good-humored bossy-boots that one doesn't mind being hectored by her for butchering the language. Not only inappropriate commas (see the Panda anecdote of the book's title for elucidation), but misused apostrophes and the disappearance of grammar teaching from schools are objects of Truss's amused ire.
Reviewed by Gale Zoë Garnett
Mary of Canada:
The Virgin Mary in Canadian
Culture, Spirituality, History
and Geography
By Joan Skogan
Banff Centre Press,
305 pages, $29.95
Chronicling the presence of the Virgin Mary in Canada, Joan Skogan finds that she saturates the country, from an image that came in with Jacques Cartier to the prayer object of B.C. fishermen. Her book is accessible, non-academic, ranges over geography and literature (Diane Schoemperlen, Margaret Atwood, Katherine Govier and other literary Madonnas) and is "full of tender acts of mercy, gleanings from a millennium of history and brilliant flashes of insight, which taken together add up to sacred meaning."
Reviewed by Wayne Grady
A Short History of Progress
By Ronald Wright
Anansi, 211 pages, $18.95
Canadian novelist, historian, scientist, essayist, inveterate traveller and travel writer Ronald Wright is just what the United States needs right now, but he's ours. This short book, which doubles as this fall's Massey Lectures, begins with Paul Gauguin's vast, breathtaking canvas, D'ou venons nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allons nous? (Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?) The author tells us it is the last question he intends to answer. "This wise, timely and brilliant book will be a bulwark against the short-sighted and the self-interested, and may also ironically save them from themselves."
Reviewed by Paul William Roberts
Jacob's Wound:
A Search for the Spirit of Wildness
By Trevor Herriot
McClelland & Stewart,
358 pages, $34.99
Jacob's Wound draws together diverse traditions and mythologies to explore the connections among Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the ancestral, pagan values hidden within them. Trevor Herriot also looks for links between his emerging Christian faith and nature, as well as the human traditions associated with living in the world. The book is "an appeal for spiritual unity, a lament for our threadbare connection to the wild, a steadfast assertion of the human need for the Earth's blessings."
Reviewed by Ross A. Laird
POLITICS
AND HISTORY
The Lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
By Michael Ignatieff
Penguin Canada, 212 pages, $22
Ignatieff, who's come under considerable fire from the left for his support of the invasion of Iraq, has crafted a learned, subtle disquisition on the dilemma democracies face in defending themselves. How, for instance, do they preserve democratic values against enemies who do not accept those values? "Michael Ignatieff is still a liberal, but one who, after Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda, is coming to terms with the uses of force." He has made a major contribution to a debate that is unpleasant but essential.
Reviewed by Margaret MacMillan
At Home in the World:
Canada's Global Vision
for the 21st Century
By Jennifer Welsh
HarperCollins, 255 pages, $32.95
Canadian and Oxford scholar Jennifer Welsh sets out her vision of Canada's future as a "model citizen" in the world: striking a balance of security and human rights, working to fund Third World development, pulling our weight militarily, and working with the United States to defend North America. She dismisses the myths that Canada can never be a player on the world stage, and that Canada is the United States' best friend. "Hers is a broad, coherent and optimistic vision rooted in who we are as a people, where we stand and what we can do. It foresees a constructive, responsible role for Canada in a world that needs all the help that it can get."
Reviewed by Paul Heinbecker
Cataclysm:
The First World War as Political Tragedy
By David Stevenson
Basic Books, 564 pages, $54
British historian David Stevenson's analysis of the First World War is a brilliant synthesis of available scholarship, as well as an advancement of his thesis that European leaders -- especially in Germany and Austria-Hungary -- deliberately set out to go to war, and did not just stumble into it. Everyone thought the war would be "over before Christmas," but once the thing was under way, every political leader found political reasons to continue. "Stevenson's great achievement is that he not only makes sense of the conflict in military and socio-economic terms, but he does so on a grand scale."
Reviewed by Roger Hall
Ghost Wars:
The Secret History of the CIA,
Afghanistan, and Bin Laden,
from the Soviet Invasion
to September 10, 2001
By Steve Coll
Penguin Press, 695 pages, $45
The important and gripping tale of how, for 10 years, the Central Intelligence Agency helped fund and arm the mujahedin, who fought off the Soviet occupation in a brutal war in Afghanistan. Washington Post reporter Coll sees this as the last covert operation of the Cold War, and one that helped produced the oppressive Taliban regime, Osama bin Laden and, ultimately, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The book is "a powerful indictment of strategic short-sightedness and intelligence weakness on the part of the United States"
Reviewed by Wesley Wark
Grace and Power:
The Private World
of the Kennedy White House
By Sally Bedell Smith
Random House, 608 pages, $39.95
In the vast library of Kennedyana, Sally Bedell Smith's book stands out as a splendid social history that re-creates the White House of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Besides her non-judgmental description of a complicated marriage involving both love and infidelity, Smith offers astute and revealing portraits of a huge supporting cast, including Bobby Kennedy, Jackie's sister Lee Radziwill, Arthur Schlesinger, Robert McNamara and many other members of Camelot's brief moment. A "dazzling book."
Reviewed by Andrew Cohen
Rising '44:
'The Battle for Warsaw'
By Norman Davies
Macmillan, 752 pages, $44
British historian Norman Davies usually writes big, sweeping histories. This one, about the heroic resistance of Polish insurgents in August, 1944, may be painted on a smaller canvas, but is artistically and morally large. Davies vividly shows how Stalin's Russian army pointedly failed to aid the Poles, and in early 1945, occupied the country itself. "With this scrupulously documented, judicious and grippingly related book, an event that stands as a model of urban guerrilla warfare, a warning about coalitions of convenience and a moral that there are some things worth fighting for, has been given its due in the annals of history."
Reviewed by Diana Kuprel
The 9/11 Commission Report:
Final Report of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States
Edited by Steven Strasser
Norton, 567 pages, $14.50
This report by a commission created more than year after 9/11 by a reluctant George W. Bush administration is "a masterpiece of investigation into the roots of the al-Qaeda strikes and the manifold failures of the U.S. government to deter or prevent their happening." It chronicles the imaginative failures that prevented U.S. intelligence agencies from seeing the possibilities of a major terrorist strike, blames both the Clinton and Bush administrations for security lapses, and proposes drastic reforms to both the CIA and the FBI. An important document for our times.
Reviewed by Wesley Wark
The Ghosts of Medak Pocket:
The Story of Canada's Secret War
By Carol Off
Random House Canada,
310 pages, $34.95
In the fall of 1993, war found the members of C Company, Second Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. In attempting to stand between the enemy factions in Bosnia, the Princess Pats came under sustained fire from Croatian forces for several days. The real trial came after, though, when the Canadian peacekeepers discovered that the Croatian forces had been "ethnic cleansing" the area. The repercussions of the action went on for years for the soldiers, many of them reservists. "Carol Off has written a first-class account of Canada's soldiers in action. Her prose is lively and her tone impassioned."
Reviewed by Michael Boire
Plan of Attack
By Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster,
467 pages, $40.50
Bob Woodward became a household name when he and fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein wrote All the President's Men, about the Watergate scandal. In this, his 11th book, Woodward, now an insider, offers a chilling fly-on-the-wall look at how the decision to go to war against Iraq was arrived at by the President and his advisers, for many of whom deposing Saddam Hussein became an obsession. Woodward "reveals how a small group of men in powerful positions can mislead a people and take them to war"
Reviewed by Thomas S. Axworthy
Infidels:
A History of the Conflict
Between Christianity and Islam
By Andrew Wheatcroft
Random House, 447 pages, $39.95
In this epic and engaging history, British historian Andrew Wheatcroft traces the roots, genealogies and landscape of the long conflict between Islam and the West. Here are tales both gripping and analytically astute, taking us from the seventh century to the 21st, and including such flashpoints as the Battle of Lepanto and the struggles in the Iberian Peninsula. This "is a dark but riveting tale of battles won and lost over centuries, and the mutual demonization of the other, at great human cost and suffering."
Reviewed by Emran Qureshi
Power, Terror, Peace and War:
America's Grand Strategy
in a World at Risk
By Walter Russell Mead
Knopf, 226 pages, $27.95
Literally hundreds of books have attempted to explain the often puzzling foreign policy of the current Bush administration. Mead, a past winner of the Gelber Award for the best book on international affairs, is optimistic that the United States can build a new and fruitful relationship with the rest of the world while containing terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, offering a politically realistic program for beginning to do so. This "is an astute and original analysis of the post-9/11 world order by one of this generation's most gifted foreign affairs scholars."
Reviewed by Dan Dunsky
Rushing to Armageddon:
The Shocking Truth About Canada,
Missile Defence, and Star Wars
By Mel Hurtig
McClelland & Stewart,
229 pages, $19.99
Fiery Canadian nationalist Mel Hurtig argues that the U.S. missile defence plan won't work, that it entails the weaponization of space, that it will make Canadians less rather than more secure, and that Prime Minister Paul Martin and Defence Minister Bill Graham have been "intentionally misleading" the country on the issue. "Hurtig has delivered a stinging indictment of our country's leaders. . . . All Canadians should read this timely book, applaud the author for his prosecutorial efforts, and demand a full and reasoned response from the accused."
Reviewed by Michael Byers
Diaspora:
Homelands in Exile
By Frédéric Brenner
HarperCollins, $150
Vol. 1, 328 pages, Vol. 2, 152 pages
This spectacular work by a French Jew with North African roots is the result of a 25-year mission: to document photographically the dispersed Jewish communities all over the world. What becomes clear in these studies (Vol. 1 is the photos, Vol. 2 the commentary and annotations) of barbers in Tajikistan, secret Jews (Marranos) in Portugal, the Orthodox in Jerusalem and women rabbis in New York is that "there is no single way of being authentically Jewish, and by extension, authentically human."
Reviewed by Martin Levin
Heart So Hungry:
The Extraordinary Expedition
of Mina Hubbard
into the Labrador Wilderness
By Randall Silvis
Knopf Canada, 266 pages, $34.95
This real-life Canadian adventure story begins in 1903, with the death in the Labrador wilderness of writer Leonidas Hubbard. His widow, Ontario housewife Mina Hubbard, vowed to finish his voyage, and did so in competition with another adventurer who wanted to tell his own version of the story. A work of "creative non-fiction at once vivid, comprehensive and compelling."
Reviewed by Ken McGoogan
SCIENCE AND NATURE
Acquainted with the Night:
Excursions through the World
after Dark
By Christopher Dewdney
HarperCollins, 313 pages, $34.95
Christopher Dewdney sticks us where the sun don't shine in this consistently fascinating trek through the world of what happens after the lights go out. Dewdney is also a poet of repute, and this work brings his gift for language together with an insatiable curiosity about the natural world, its magic and menace, its night stalkers and creepy-crawlies and ladies of the night. As you read, "the night we're all familiar with will emerge as a fresh thing, deeper, fuller, older, younger, more evocative, more intimate, larger, more spectacular and, yes, more magical, and much more thrilling."
Reviewed by Margaret Atwood
Prairie:
A Natural History
By Candace Savage
GreyStone/David Suzuki
Foundation, 309 pages, $60
Candace Savage delivers a passionate and edifying lecture on the grasslands that have been described as "the planet's most altered ecosystem." Never resorting to scientific jargon, Savage takes us through the life cycle of water, the natural history of grasshoppers, oil and grama grass, making the most prosaic subjects both entertaining and informative. The book is generous with illustrations and photographs, but "Savage's verbal account, laden with its wealth of current scientific discovery and impelled with its sense of the miraculous in nature, eclipses the beauty of its own visuals."
Reviewed by David Carpenter
Chasing Clayoquot:
A Wilderness Almanac
By David Pitt-Brooke
Raincoast, 288 pages, $34.95
For the past decade, "Clayoquot" has been a symbol, a flashpoint for environmentalism, especially in its dispute against the logging of old-growth forests. Naturalist and former veterinarian David Pitt-Brooke adopts the venerable form of the wilderness almanac -- a month-by-month journey through the seasons -- to create a subtle and sensitive reading of both the natural and political-economic forces at play. This is no righteous harangue, but "a thoughtful and humane consideration of irreconcilable interests, prefaced by his own experiences on the land, packed . . . with pertinent detail, metaphor and imagining."
Reviewed by Trevor Herriot
CANADIAN FICTION
The Nine Planets
By Edward Riche
Viking Canada, 302 pages, $34
Marty Devereaux is miserable. Co-founder and vice-principal of a snobby St. John's private school, he owns his own home, has an undemanding girlfriend and drives a Saab. But he's in the grip of ennui and can't find anything interesting to do with his life. Instead, he complains and whines. His niece, Cathy, just as disaffected, wanders in alleys and wonders about the meaning of life. "Riche's tone is muscular and aggressive, but his method is satirical, rather than didactic. . . . So charming is his manner that the glib and outrageous opinions his characters utter are unnervingly persuasive."
Reviewed by Patrick Kavanagh
Woman in Bronze
By Antanas Sileika
Random House Canada,
389 pages, $34.95
The hero of Antanas Sileika's novel is wood sculptor Tomas Stumbras, who leaves the family farm in Lithuania to pursue his fortune, or at least his artistic vision, first in Poland then in the Paris of the 1920s. In Paris, he finds work as a carpenter for the Folies Bergère, where he meets singer and dancer Josephine Baker, and his circle of acquaintances comes to include Maurice Utrillo, Jacques Lipchitz and Jazz-Age other notables. "It is a rite of passage to abandon home, and to act out of passion rather than duty. Woman in Bronze is a passionate book that does honour to all its homes."
Review by Michael Redhill
The Hatbox Letters
By Beth Powning
Knopf Canada, 352 pages, $32
Kate Harding is a widow, living in a riverside farmhouse in rural New Brunswick. She is still grieving over the early death of her husband. Then she accepts responsibility for nine antique hatboxes full of letters by her father's family. These letters, which date back to 1797, open Kate's world and help face her grief. So does a chance meeting with an old friend dealing with a tragedy of his own. "Powning has crafted a deeply beautiful book, one planted in the natural world, abundant in imagery that firmly roots Kate and the reader in the fecund cycle of life. . . . The Hatbox Letters is both elegy and song of joy."
Reviewed by M. J. Anderson
The Big Why
By Michael Winter
Anansi, 374 pages, $36
Michael Winter's novel is a faux memoir of U.S. artist Rockwell Kent's 1914 move from New York City to Brigus, Nfld., soon to be followed by his wife and children. Kent had tired of the New York art world, and a was vigorous opponent of the abstract art that characterized the scene in those days. Winter nicely dissects Kent's reasons, good and bad, for going to the Rock. "A wonderful novel . . . [an]engaging, funny, keenly observed, disarmingly wise tale."
Reviewed by David Macfarlane
Claire's Head
By Catherine Bush
McClelland & Stewart,
352 pages, $32.99
Rachel Barber, a medical journalist, has chronic migraines that have nearly ruined her life. When she disappears after visiting the Montreal Neurological Institute, researching the cause of migraines, her younger sister, Allison, makes a home for Rachel's daughter, and Claire, her youngest sister, must find Rachel, or find out what happened to her. The search takes her around the world, and deep into her own head. (All three sisters suffer migraines, and deal differently with them.) "Catherine Bush . . . is as attuned to oddity and as sly, subtle, brainy and deadpan as Wertmuller or Barbara Gowdy or, come to that, Thomas Mann."
Reviewed by T. F. Rigelhof
Bedlam
By Greg Hollingshead
HarperCollins, 479 pages, $34.95
At the end of the 18th century, the insane asylum of Bethlehem, better known as Bedlam, had one incompetent doctor, a number of untrained attendants, almost no government funding, and a caring apothecary named John Haslam, whose journal inspired Greg Hollingshead's historical novel. Inmate James Tilly Matthews was a paranoid schizophrenic, but was incarcerated basically for opposing war against France. "Bedlam is stylishly written, full of dazzling, epigrammatic insights into authority, tyranny, jealousy, love and other knotty aspects of human nature."
Reviewed by Emma Donoghue
Runaway
By Alice Munro
McClelland & Stewart/Douglas
Gibson Books, 335 pages, $34.99
Each of the eight stories in Alice Munro's newest book carries a single-word title: Chance, Silence, Passion etc. Each is a distillation of the story's theme, but each also carries the broader weight of Munro's central human interests. Three of the stories -- Chance, Soon and Silence -- are linked, telling the story of a woman named Juliet from first love to abiding loss. "Cynthia Ozick has said, of Munro, that she is our Chekhov. But . . . Munro does not always choose to show compassion. Like life itself, she remains neutral. So she is our Flaubert, too. We couldn't ask for more."
Reviewed by Claire Messud
This Body
By Tessa McWatt
HarperCollins, 325 pages $32.95
Sixtyish Victoria Layne is a hospital cook in London when she suddenly finds herself in charge of her eight-year-old nephew, Derek, son of Victoria's much younger sister, who died in a car crash in their native Guyana. Thrust into the role of mother, which she manifests by feeding Derek rich Caribbean dishes he doesn't really like, Victoria begins to shake off years of emotional repression, even to seek intimacy. Derek, meanwhile, learns to survive in a schoolyard full of bullies. "In This Body, Tessa McWatt has served up a redolent, rib-sticking dish, full of the complex flavours of truth."
Reviewed by Margaret Gunning
In the Place of Last Things
By Michael Helm
McClelland & Stewart,
330 pages, $32.99
Russell Littlebury's father, Mike, has died, so Russ assumes the task of driving his aunt from Saskatchewan to her wintering grounds in Arizona. Reluctantly, he takes along 27-year-old Skidder, a sort of unofficial cousin. During a visit to some of Mike's born-again relatives in Montana, Russ and Skidder become involved with the family's pregnant daughter, Lea, and end up on a side road-trip for a confrontation with her erstwhile lover, and with the past and themselves. "The writing is funny and incisive, with a terrific newness about it."
Reviewed by Karen Solie
What Casanova Told Me
By Susan Swan
Knopf Canada, 324 pages, $34.95
Two stories unfold in Susan Swan's novel. In one, Luce Adams must come to grips with the death of her much-loved mother, which means, in part, attending a ceremony in Crete. In another, Luce finds the journal of a distant ancestor, a cross-dressing woman named Asked For Adams, along with a cache of letters by Jacob Casanova. Luce's journey to Crete, by way of Venice, replicates in many ways the journey of Asked For Adams and Casanova. " What Casanova Told Me is breathtaking, a tour de force that detonates echoes of the past within the present."
Reviewed by Aritha van Herk
So This is Love:
Lollipop and Other Stories
By Gilbert Reid
Key Porter, 222 pages, $21.95
Gilbert Reid, film producer, diplomat, economist and lecturer, shows a dab hand at writing in his first book of stories. The stories range from Bosnia to Paris to Africa to rural Ontario, and feature crackling, superbly revealing dialogue between Croat and Serb, two lovers, father and daughter, man and boy. "Reid appears to be unversed in the canon of CanLit first fictions. We can be glad he jumped the queue."
Reviewed by Jim Bartley
Adultery
By Richard B. Wright
HarperCollins, 243 pages, $32.95
Daniel Fielding, a happily married, fiftysomething Toronto book editor, and Denise Crowder, a younger colleague, attend the Frankfurt book fair and become lovers. Visiting England for a weekend, they walk on a lonely beach and then return to their car, where they make love and fall asleep. Denise slips out of the car and is never seen alive again. The bulk of Wright's novel is concerned with how Daniel came to this pass, and how he deals with the aftermath. "In his depiction of how people survive terrible tragedies, how they do endure and get on with things, Wright has written a gripping and memorable novel."
Reviewed by Margot Livesey
All That Matters
By Wayson Choy
Doubleday Canada,
423 pages, $35.95
Choy's Trillium-co-winning novel The Jade Peony, set in Vancouver's Chinatown of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, was narrated by three of the four Chen children. All That Matters is narrated throughout by Kiam-Kim, First Son, who remembers arriving in Vancouver with Father and redoubtable Grandmother, Poh-Poh. His adult viewpoint gives new perspectives on The Jade Peony, but the book very much stands on its own. "The language, the rhythms and the images are so seductive and often so exquisite that the temptation is to keep quoting."
Reviewed by Mary Millar
A Short Journey By Car
By Liam Durcan
Véhicule, 200 pages, $16.95
Liam Durcan, a Montreal neurologist, offers 16 stories of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations: a Moscow dentist who finds himself working on Stalin's teeth; an insurance company who volunteers for a drug study, and enters a kind of nirvana; the patrons of a Paris restaurant in 1895, when the Lumière brothers introduce the cinématographe, who a dumbstruck to see a train burst soundlessly through the wall. "Durcan perfectly captures our most magical, most volatile illusions."
Reviewed by Jim Bartley
North of Nowhere, South of Loss
By Janette Turner Hospital
Harper Perennial,
283 pages, $23.95
Janette Turner Hospital's 15 stories range to the four corners of the world, but inevitably return to the "rampant luxurious mess" of the jungles of Queensland, in Australia. Although not all the stories are linked, there are many overlapping characters, and they generally trace life from childhood to adulthood. "Hospital presents us with a savage universe, tales made macabre as everyday life turns menacing and devours its characters. . . . Yet in the midst of this savagery, [she]treats her characters with a luminous tenderness."
Reviewed by Valmai Howe
A Complicated Kindness
By Miriam Toews
Knopf Canada, 246 pages, $29.95
In her fourth book (and third novel), which just won the Governor-General's Award for fiction, Winnipegger Miriam Toews has created in teenager Nomi Nickel one of the freshest voices in recent CanLit, and in the small Mennonite community of East Village, Man., a fully realized setting. The moral, and sometimes physical, collision of the two creates a novel that is by turns funny, rueful and sad. "There is so much here that's accomplished and fine. The momentum of the narrative, the quality of the storytelling, the startling images . . . the observant, cataloguing eye of the writer, her great grace."
Reviewed by Bill Richardson
Muriella Pent
By Russell Smith
Doubleday Canada,
348 pages, $29.95
In this tale of a middle-aged socialite rampant in the Toronto arts scene, Russell Smith reveals himself to be a satirist of wit and serious purpose. The purpose is to look at what art is, how it should made, and how artists might be expected to live. The wit lies in Smith's take-no-prisoners approach to all forms of political and artistic correctness. "The more I think about it, the more I dare entertain the surely sacrilegious notion that dandyish Mister Smith, as he's been called, is a successor to that rumpled mensch of St. Urbain Street."
Reviewed by Zsuzsi Gartner
The Collected Stories
By Carol Shields
Random House Canada,
593 pages, $39.95
When Carol Shields died, in 2003, Canadian writing lost one of its stars and one of its best people. At the time of her death, Shields was working on a new novel, Segue, the fragment of which is included in this collection of her short fiction. It shows her once again to be a sharp observer and cheerful, desperate critic of life domestic and otherwise. With this "important collection, we her readers can experience once again the privilege of stepping into Carol Shields's brilliantly rendered, many-faceted world with all its dramatic contrasts of private light and darkness."
Reviewed by Jane Urquhart
Natasha and Other Stories
By David Bezmozgis
HarperCollins,
147 pages, $24.95
On the strength of this slim volume, and some stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, David Bezmozgis, not yet 30, is now one of the coming figures in Canadian writing. These seven stories create a forceful and vivid impression of life as lived in 1980s Toronto by Latvian-Jewish immigrants (like Bezmozgis) Roman and Bella Berman, and as narrated by their son Mark. "What if Isaac Babel, the Russian-Jewish master of the modern short story, hadn't been executed by Stalin's goons?" Bezmozgis may not be quite Babel yet, but he seems well on the way.
Reviewed by Josh Lambert
Galveston
By Paul Quarrington
Random House Canada,
247 pages, $34.95
On the island of Dampier Cay, a group of disparate and emotionally challenged hurricane-chasers pursue the perfect storm. That is the premise of Paul Quarrington's Giller Prize-short-listed novel, his ninth, a blend of sharp description of place and humorous account of character, plus awesome descriptions of a terrible storm and a fair bit of sex. "Save it for a rainy day -- a really rainy day."
Reviewed by T. F. Rigelhof
So Beautiful
By Ramona Dearing
Porcupine's Quill,
163 pages, $18.95
Newfoundlander Ramona Dearing has produced "a terrific collection of stories about the people you get stuck with in life. Roommates, siblings, drinking buddies, all the ones you think you would never choose, but who become central to the way you function in the world and even to the way that you evaluate your own worth." Written in a naturalistic style, and with a powerfully vivid sense of place, these are stories of raw humanity in an unstable world.
Reviewed by Natalee Caple
Norman Bray, in the
Performance of His Life
By Trevor Cole
McClelland & Stewart
376 pages, $34.99
Trevor Cole's very funny, very astute debut novel, which was short-listed for the Governor-General's Award, is the tale of a mid-fiftyish actor who is vain, lecherous, annoying, a moocher and, yet, somehow redeemably endearing. For Bray, all the world's a stage, and he is its main player. "Cole knows how to tell a story of the I-couldn't-put-it-down variety; Norman's performance is filled with giddy surprises and wonderful set pieces. The book is smart and deft; it zips along. This is fine writing, with a light and generous touch."
Reviewed by Don Hannah
The Stowaway
By Robert Hough
Random House Canada
232 pages, $32.95
Robert Hough's second novel is a powerfully naturalistic fictionalization of the case of the tanker Maersk Dubai, which docked in Halifax in 1996. There the Filipino crew deserted their Taiwanese officers, claiming their superiors had thrown stowaways overboard. The case wound its way through the courts of several countries, with no one convicted. This Zola-like account of the lives of the poor under harsh masters is "a fine, strong . . . novel that's both a social document and an absorbing read."
Reviewed by Michael Basilières
The Haunted Hillbilly
By Derek McCormack
ECW, 118 pages, $24.95
Neither quite a novel, nor a poem, nor a country song, Derek McCormack's unique work somewhat follows the life of country music idol Hank Williams, including his Grand Ole Opry debut and his dealings with Nudie Cohn, designer of classic but eccentric country regalia. McCormack "has re-created an alternative version of Hank Williams that is sometimes disturbing, often unsettling and always captivating."
Reviewed by Steven Galloway
Beyond Measure
By Pauline Holdstock
Cormorant, 355 pages, $22.95
With her sixth novel, Sidney, B.C. writer (and English native) Pauline Holdstock broke out, being short-listed for the 2004 Giller Prize. This fantastical, beguiling, somewhat macabre novel, set in 16th-century Italy, is occasion for investigating big questions: truth, beauty, nature. As Holdstock's cast of characters, many of them artists, are betrayed by irrationality, it seems that "art proves the only power capable of preserving beauty and truth while staving off the horror of waking lives."
Reviewed by Nikki Barrett
Thieves
By Janice Kulyk Keefer
HarperFlamingo Canada,
303 pages, $34.95
Janice Kulyk Keefer's novel enters the territory staked out in A. S. Byatt's Possession and Michael Cunningham's The Hours, with a contemporary tale set against a mystery connected with a literary figure from the past, with a third narrative in the middle distance. The figure in this case is the New Zealander Katherine Mansfield, a contemporary of Virginia Woolf and writer of elegantly potent short stories. " Thieves is a subtle work of art that repays close reading, and Janice Kulyk Keefer deserves all the recognition at home and abroad this book is likely to gain her."
Reviewed by T. F. Rigelhof
Emma's Hands
By Mary Swan
Porcupine's Quill,
153 pages, $16.95
In 20 years of writing, Guelph, Ont., author Mary Swan has produced not much more than a dozen stories, and one much-praised novella, The Deep. She may not be prolific -- more Alistair McLeod than Joyce Carol Oates -- but her "character-driven pieces," set in such disparate places as the Belgian seaside, an Israeli kibbutz and post-Franco Spain, "typically relate on two levels at once: documented day-to-day minutiae contrasted with, and often accompanied by, a deeper psychological truth surfaced in dreams, memories, epiphanies."
Reviewed by Maggie Mortimer
Doctor Bloom's Story
By Don Coles
Knopf Canada, 304 pages, $34.95
Don Coles has long been acknowledged as among Canada's leading poets, but it took him until the age of 75 to produce his first novel. It was worth waiting for. In the novel, Dutch-born cardiologist Nicolaas Bloom moves from Cambridge to Toronto after his wife dies, and encounters a complex web of love and friendship. Dr. Bloom, whose consciousness the novel mostly inhabits, is "one of the most memorable and triumphantly conceived characters in recent Canadian fiction."
Reviewed by Carmine Starnino
The Long Run
By Leo Furey
Key Porter, 368 pages, $24.95
Leo Furey's wonderfully funny, distressing, even heartbreaking novel takes place in the Mount Kildare Orphanage, in Newfoundland. It as a bedlam of lost boys and madly controlling keepers, to which the vividly drawn Aiden Carmichael is the reader's guide. Full of sharply drawn characters, " The Long Run is a ghastly-wonderful journey through a pious hell run by lunatics, an antic dance of grim humour, genuine pathos and final redeeming joy."
Reviewed by Jim Bartley
Some Great Thing
By Colin McAdam
Raincoast, 403 pages, $34.95
McAdam's debut was short-listed for the 2004 Governor-General's Award, and with good reason. This story of plasterer and property developer Jerry McGuinty goes far beyond its well-crafted setting in the Ottawa construction boom of the 1970s, and gives us a portrait of a man in full that would be worthy of a young Mordecai Richler. " Some Great Thing is as smart, as wickedly funny, as unexpected and as good as a couple of the very best of the Giller Prize-winners."
Reviewed by T. .F. Rigelhof
FOREIGN FICTION
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
By Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury, 782 pages, $29.95
Jonathan Strange is the protagonist of this massive, ambitious novel, set in an alternative early 19th-century England where magic works. Mr. Norrell, a fussy, academic magician, is mentor to the talented Jonathan. There are subplots galore and appearances by the Duke of Wellington, King George and Lord Byron. " Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is wonderful. At almost 800 pages, it is an immense, densely plotted story, peopled with a vast cast of extremely well-drawn characters, filled with unexpected events, ancient prophesies, varied and exotic settings, and all manner of human and inhuman conflict, and it is built one splendid scene upon the next."
Reviewed by Kenneth Oppel
The Divine Husband
By Francisco Goldman
Atlantic Monthly Press,
465 pages, $35.95
This novel by American Latino Francisco Goldman is based on real events in Guatemala in the second half of the 19th century. The main character is María de las Nieves Moran, whose life puts her in contact with a host of other characters, both historical and fictional, including the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí. " The Divine Husband is structurally complex, rich in detail and layering. . . . an enormous animated collage made from sepia portraits of people from another era."
Reviewed by Beatriz Hausner
Bitter Fruit
By Achmat Dangor
HarperCollins, 281 pages, $24.95
In Bitter Fruit, short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize, Silas Ali is a mixed-race liaison between the minister of justice and the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. His wife, Lydia, was raped 19 years before by a policeman. Her son, Mikey, is the product of that rape and comes to bear the burden of it. "Dangor's challenge has been to present a complex 'new South Africa' . . . harkening back to the old days when there was something evil to press up against to test one's ideology, when one's moral work was clear-cut. His achievement in this is extraordinary."
Reviewed by
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Heir to the Glimmering World
By Cynthia Ozick
Houghton Mifflin,
310 pages, $34.95
Known especially as an essayist, Cynthia Ozick has also produced novels that offer the collision of the literary and the mundane, told with meticulous scholarship and wit. In this novel, Rudolf Mitwisser, his wife, Elsa, and their five children are refugees from Hitler's Berlin, who land in the semi-rural Bronx during the Depression. The novel is Dickensian in its larger-than-life characters, and we hear the story from the perspective of Rose Meadows, a 19-year-old orphan. "[Ozick]is in a class with Philip Roth, John Updike, Grace Paley, Saul Bellow and, yes, Alice Munro: enough said."
Reviewed by Annabel Lyon
The Darling
By Russell Banks
Knopf Canada, 394 pages, $35
Hannah Musgrave is a sixtysomething former political activist, now living on a farm in upstate New York, who decides to return to Liberia, the west African country where she fled in her youth after being accused of terrorism, and where she worked with chimpanzees, married and had three children. The return doesn't really work out, but the trip is filled with surprising turns and memorable events. " The Darling ends with a provocative claim. 'I saw,' Hannah says, 'that the story of my life could have no significance in the larger world.' "
Reviewed by Michael Winter
The Plot Against America
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin,
391 pages, $36.95
Philip Roth offers an alternative history, in which the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940, and takes the United States into an alliance with Nazi Germany, implementing a series of anti-Jewish laws that dramatically affect the lives of the Roth family of Newark, N.J. "A book about the end of Jewish culture told in the invisible style of the majority, this is the inverse of Roth's great narrative irony, in which he criticizes Jews in a voice that celebrates every dimension of Jewish culture."
Reviewed by Lee Henderson
A Bit on the Side
By William Trevor
Knopf Canada, 243 pages, $34.95
As usual in his stories, Irish writer William Trevor is concerned more about aftermaths than the actual events themselves: Love is gone, fortunes have dwindled, crimes have been committed. With the invisible craftsmanship that has always marked his short fiction, Trevor tells simple stories and lets the accumulation of revealed details fill in the complexities and subtleties. " A Bit on the Side is a serious book, even grave, but for all Trevor's dealings in betrayals and regrets, there's a brightness."
Reviewed by Stephen Smith
Snow
By Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Maureen Freely
Knopf, 426 pages, $38
Orhan Pamuk's protagonist is Ka, a Turkish poet who, after living in exile for 12 years, returns to Istanbul for his mother's funeral, and accepts an assignment to cover the municipal elections in a small town, and to report on young girls who are martyring themselves to protest a ban on headscarves. As well, Ka has a "plan" to marry Ipek, a beautiful woman from his student days, who now helps run her father's seedy hotel. "No one is quite what they seem in this bewitching novel, and none of the characters is satisfied with how he or she seems -- some even resist being in the book."
Reviewed by Thomas Meaney
Cloud Atlas
By David Mitchell
Vintage Canada,
509 pages, $24.95
British novelist David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas consists of six wildly disparate stories -- historical fiction, science fiction, pulp, correspondence -- only tenuously related except in the theme of humans preying on one another either individually or as a society. "Fellow novelists will find it hard not to heap . . . praise on David Mitchell, whose brilliance takes one's breath away in a manner not unlike a first experience of Chartres or the Duomo."
Reviewed by Charles Foran
Don Quixote
By Miguel de Cervantes
Translated by Edith Grossman
Ecco, 976 pages, $44.95
One of the great works of world literature, and arguably the first great novel, this tale of the chivalrous but mad knight errant tilting at windmills, and his realist servant Sancho Panza, remains timeless. Part One was published in 1605, and was translated into English by 1612. Edith Grossman's wonderful translation is consistent with Cervantes's vision of Don Quixote's own bookishness, and "much of its colour and texture is here to hold our attention and delight us."
Reviewed by Stephen Rupp
The Early Stories:
1953-1975
By John Updike
Knopf, 838 pages, $50
John Updike's more than 50 volumes of published work include novels, memoirs, criticism, and these short stories that show him to have been almost fully formed as a writer from the start: "These are not stories that should fall into the hands of creative writing students; their example would be too discouraging." This massive collection of 103 early stories features Updike's mature themes -- sexual love, adultery, religious longing -- and reveal a writer of range and amplitude, one who can "balance a labyrinthine sentence with his effortless assurance and grace."
Reviewed by Guy Vanderhaeghe
Personality
By Andrew O'Hagan
Harcourt Brace, 312 pages, $37.50
Glasgow-born Andrew O'Hagan, whose first two books were respectively short-listed for the Booker Prize ( Our Fathers) and Scottish Writer of the Year Award ( The Missing), has crafted an exquisite tale of life in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, a small island off Scotland, one steeped in the sensory specifics of place. "His ear for dialogue and bone-true interior talk is reminiscent of Woolf or Chekhov, and he conjures up the 1970s and '80s with eerie precision. This is writing to treasure."
Reviewed by Sarah Sheard
Celestial Harmonies
By Peter Esterházy
Translated by Judith Sollosy
HarperCollins, 846 pages, $39.95
Esterházy, a leading Hungarian writer, has produced a family epic that is not so much a novel as "a display of supernatural literary virtuosity hitched to a tormented obsession with heritage, fatherhood and history," the unsettling, often poetic Celestial Harmonies takes us on a challenging tour of Hungarian and European history, from the Turkish invasion of Hungary in 1526 to the Holocaust. "The appearance of this novel in English enlarges our humanity."
Reviewed by Stephen Henighan
The Master
By Colm Toíbín
McClelland & Stewart,
338 pages, $34.99
Irish writer Colm Toíbín's masterful novel begins with Henry James's failure as a playwright and then takes us back and forth from the late 1890s in England to the author's New England boyhood and its formative events. Toíbín does a superb job of inhabiting the consciousness of perhaps the most nuance-sensitive man who ever lived. " The Master deserves more than a Man Booker Prize [for which it was short-listed]and a sumptuous Merchant- Ivory film: It deserves to be read."
Reviewed by Annabel Lyon
Small Island
By Andrea Levy
Headline, 441 pages, $24.95
The winner of this year's Orange Prize is a large novel about small islands. Jamaican newlyweds Hortense and Gilbert Joseph arrive in London in 1948, looking for a better life. In their rude rejection by a host country they admire, the couple represents the postwar collision of two island cultures, and the legacy of colonialism and bigotry. "Levy's self-confidence is remarkable. And so is the way she is able to keep her distance, to view racism as malleable material for the artist."
Reviewed by Donna Bailey Nurse
Some Hope: A Trilogy
By Edward St. Aubyn
Open City, 336 pages, $21.95
In this trilogy of short novels by an English writer who should be much better known, a great wrong is done to the protagonist, Patrick Melrose, and the arc of the books is from that initial wrong to eventual release. This is a great and surprising work about forgiveness, and its necessity to overcome trauma and effect some form of healing. The trilogy, which takes Melrose from the ages of 5 to 30, is often harrowing (there's rape and drug addiction), but "like all great works. . . . is wonderfully suggestive and as playful as it is serious."
Reviewed by André Alexis
Popular Music from Vittula
By Mikael Niemi
Translated by Laurie Thompson
Seven Stories, 235 pages, $32.95
It's safe to say that contemporary Finnish fiction is pretty much unknown in North America, but Mikael Niemi's tale, a runaway bestseller in Scandinavia, should go some way toward changing that. This novel with a rock 'n' roll heart is set in the 1960s and finds alienated pals Matti (the narrator) and Niila travelling, dealing with dysfunctional families and playing in a band. This "playful, rueful and wondrous" novel with a magic realist touch is also funny and moving.
Reviewed by Kevin Chong
POETRY
Collected Poems
By Ted Hughes
Faber & Faber, 1,333 pages, $85
Although most famous for his tormented relationship with Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes was among the most significant poets of the second half of the 20th century. This huge volume contains not just the major works, but even the juvenilia. Especially powerful are many of the early poems, such as those from Hawk, which show off the poet's "uncanny ability to imagine otherness, whether hawk or gnat, and to render the creature in vivid close-up. In his poetry we do not simply read about nature, we experience nature."
Reviewed by Kenneth Sherman
Mortal Arguments
By Sue Sinclair
Brick, 92 pages, $15
Sue Sinclair's subtle, lyrical, philosophical poem might be classified by some as "garden variety" work about angels and flowers and bodies. But in her crisp and lyrical work, she joins other woman poets, such as Stephanie Bolster and Anne Simpson, who are subverting that stereotype while still employing some of its imagery and traditions. "It's been years since I've been so pleased to read a poet I didn't know beforehand. Sue Sinclair is a major talent, deserving a wide readership and critical attention."
Reviewed by George Murray
Camber: Selected Poems
By Don McKay
McClelland & Stewart,
212 pages, $19.99
The multi-award winning Don McKay is one of Canada's most distinguished contemporary poets. In this collection, he proves once again his remarkable inventiveness, his mastery of metaphor. His poems are almost like jazz riffs, darting, apparently effortless. "There is a subtle intelligence at work . . . that exercises a rhythmic dance through wit and wistfulness. I swim in the lavish outpouring of his heart, swept both down and upstream, going where he goes willingly, without resistance, toward any number of 'drastic possibilities,' any one of which I trust will take me, sacred, home."
Reviewed by Patrick Lane