David Bergen's The Matter with Morris Harper Collins, 2010 You might have guessed that David Bergen's The Time in Between wasn't my favourite book from the Giller Prize shortlist of 2005. It wasn't that I disliked it, so much as I felt disconnected from it. It felt like a universal
Dear Giller Shortlist, Oh, how I used to wait for your five names. Before readers could tweet about you, I camped on your webpage and, with a book in hand, pounded the refresh button religiously with every page turn. (My tech-minded fella told me it could be harmful to strike
Richard B. Wright's Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard Phyllis Bruce - Harper Collins, 2010 I was so annoyed with myself as a reader for not properly appreciating Richard Wright's October; I knew it was very well-done and it was simply my preternatural attachment to his earlier novel, Clara Callan, that interfered with
Michael Winter's This All Happened: A Fictional Memoir House of Anansi, 2000 Gabriel English was also the protagonist of Michael Winter's short story collection One Last Good Look. I realized this after I had finished this novel and felt a little badly. As though I'd arrived significantly late for an
Alison Pick's The Sweet Edge Raincoast, 2005 You know how sometimes you pick up a book and it's just not the right timing? That was true for me and Alison Pick's first novel, The Sweet Edge, which I first picked up, shortly after publication, in 2005. Even though I'd been
