Nothing like a good mystery. Some serial fun, with Giles Blunt, Ian Hamilton, Louise Penny, or my most recent discovery, the Nina Borg series by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. But one can find a good page-turner in the standalone novels on the fiction shelves too. Take Claire Cameron's freshly published The Bear, longlisted
Within pages, the bookish will find a niche to inhabit in Rebecca Mead's book, in much the same way that the author has inhabited the pages of Middlemarch. Bond Street Books - Doubleday, 2014 Perhaps not in exactly the same way, for as the author posits, that particularly
Reading Craig Davidson's Cataract City took me somewhere else. You might think, if you have heard something of the novel, that I am about to say Niagara Falls. But as much as the novel is about two boys' coming-of-age in this environs, it is a study of how 'what-came-before' morphs and
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
The title story of this collection, my favourite, "The Variance", is filled with so many details that it reads a little like a logic puzzle. (I like logic puzzles and short stories.) 2012; Doubleday - Random House, 2013 Sometimes the details have direct and practical significance, as with
