The shortlist for the Toronto Book Award nearly always introduces me to the work of one writer whose work I did not know. (This year, I "discovered" Kevin Irie's poetry.) • Kamal Al-Solaylee, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (HarperCollins Canada) Harper Collins, 2012 Much of this memoir speaks
I've read some remarkable short story collections this year: Théodora Armstrong's Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility, Ayelet Tsabari's The Best Place on Earth, Saleema Nawaz's Mother Superior, Richard van Camp's Godless But Loyal to Heaven, Miranda Hill's Sleeping Funny, and Paul Headrick's The Doctrine of Affections. Three more collections have captured
Rupert Thomson's Secrecy is suffused with deliciously disturbing images and scenes. A thin, dark ribbon of sky. Bared teeth with clumps of hair. A dead bird that dangles from a girl’s first like a flower needing water. A snake skin shed in a doorway. A secret passage. A stabbed countess. A
Dan Vyleta's The Crooked Maid pulls readers into a suspenseful, dark tale as swiftly as the train carrying Anna Beer and Robert Siedal pulls into the Vienna station. Although it does share some characters with the author's previous novel, The Quiet Twin, it can be read as a standalone novel. Both
Perhaps it's only to give readers an idea of how special it all was to Charlie. "I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the writing of a man's life at least gives you an idea of just how special it all was to him the first time around."
