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
Jonathan Goldstein's short reading from I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow was very funny. He read its introduction, along with a short piece about Mary Poppins and The Penguin and umbrella usage, and a longer story about the time his mother asked him to go with her to the store to
Reading The Tea Lords in close proximity to Lawrence Hill's novel The Book of Negroes raises the question of what stories one prefers to hear told. The Tea Lords chronicles life on an Dutch colonial tea plantation in Java in the 1870s, from the plantation owner's perspective. The Book of
