Rigoberta Menchú Tum is telling the stories of her Mayan girlhood in The Girl from Chimel. (So it turns out that you can discover a Nobel Peace Prize winner by reading a storybook, by dabbling in the backlist of a favourite indie press.) Although born into poverty in
On one hand, I could have counted the books about same-sex romances and suicide that were available to me as a young reader twenty-five years ago. Not that the two themes necessarily coexist in the same work (as they do, for instance, in Skim and Monoceros), but each of the
Perhaps Hélène is not a likely hero. She is "only eight years old, a bit florid in colour, with bluish veins on a body that weighed twenty-three kilos, holding back a mind that was always trying to run off to faraway, pitiless realms". Oscar sounds like a more heroic name,
A cult figure. A "genuine anti-hero; an impossible character yet impossible not to like". Random House Canada, 2012Trans. Don Bartlett That's how the author's site describes Harry Hole, who is at the heart of Jo Nesbø's popular series. 'Hole' is pronounced Hoo-leh, by the way, although the Australians in
The epigraph to Ru is the reader's first clue that this novel embraces complexity. 2009; Random House Canada, 2012 (English) The reader learns that the word, in French, means a small stream, literally (and, figuratively, a flow -- of tears, blood or memory). Whereas, in Vietnamese, 'ru' means
