You might be tempted to call eight-year-old Egg Murakami enchanting or winsome. Even plucky or spirited. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 Each of these terms does reflect Egg in some sense. But such descriptions suggest something young-Oprah-heroine-esque about her. Egg’s character is too fully rounded to simply select the
Although I always have a small stack of books underway, I have carried to extremes this act of multi-booking this summer. Yesterday I finished Michael Crummey’s new novel (Sweetland), Alison Wearing’s memoir (Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter), Jan Zwicky’s poetry collection, the second volume in the Fruits Basket manga series,
Shani Mootoo sidles up to her story. Random House Canada, 2014 A novel like Padma Viswanathan’s The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is more openly preoccupied with questions of grief and loss. One like Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts explores family relationships and the passage of time in
Readers might expect a retelling of the ancient Greek tale of Paris and Helen to be a bulky, wordy novel as useful for propping up a window on a hot summer day as for entertainment; but Jonatham Bennett's contemporary version of the story is a slim, polished novel that one would need to
I’ve been reading so fiercely this summer, that my notebook was sadly neglected, in favour of backs of envelopes, sticky-notes, and receipts. It was actually back in June that I scribbled down this quote from Phyllis Theroux’s The Journal Keeper (2010), which I was inspired to pick up because I
