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."
A quick glance at my bookshelves and you would think that Jane Urquhart is one of my favourite authors. I have all of her novels save one -- a couple of hardcovers purchased new -- but I have a habit of leaving them unfinished. Nonetheless, the themes she pursues in
Anne Peile’s Repeat It Today with Tears Serpent’s Tail, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Kathryn Harrison’s 1997 memoir, The Kiss, considering the author’s four-year-long consensual relationship with her father, opens, as you might have guessed, with a kiss. “Against such backdrops, my
Emma Henderson's Grace Williams Says It Loud Sceptre - Hodder & Stoughton, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) At first the cover might seem gimmicky, but now, having read Emma Henderson’s first novel, I realize that it’s the perfect way to summarize the
Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion Knopf, 1987 I first read this as a teenager. I’d already been reading a lot of adult literature, even if I was still regularly re-reading childhood favourites like the Anne books and still discovering some classics like K.M. Peyton’s Flambards stories and
