Thomas Wharton's Icefields (1995) Readers will recognize quickly whether there is a match to be made between them and Thomas Wharton's first novel. Ten pages should do it. First, there is the epigraph, from Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter: "As if everything in the world is the history of ice."
Emma Donoghue's Room HarperCollins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) I’d hoped to re-read Room before writing about it here, in the context of the Orange Prize shortlist, but I still have two fresh reads from this year’s shortlist ahead of me (The
Michael Crummey's Galore Doubleday- Random House, 2009 Yes, it's true: I have fallen under another bookspell. Unlike the two instances of this earlier in my reading year, with Sarah Waters and Hiromi Goto, this is with an author I haven't read before: Michael Crummey. And perhaps it is because I am
Hiromi Goto's The Kappa Child Red Deer Press, 2001 The Kappa Child is definitely the Hiromi Goto novel that I'll be recommending most often, although I'm starting to get the feeling that this author is going to be of the sort that I enjoy so solidly that I end up
Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms (1993) This debut novel is a great choice for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge because relationships, particularly those between women, are at the heart of it, even more particularly, the relationships between three women in one family: Naoe, Keiko and Muriel (a.k.a. Murasaki, which is
