Choosing a stack based on whimsy rather than duty urged me to binge on these books with enthusiasm. The afternoon heat was held at bay by good stories and an assortment of drinks (often rum with some sort of fruit juice, from tangerine to strawberry, lemon to cherry). And without
As an only child, my fascination with large families in fiction stretches back to the Marches, the Moffats and the All-of-a-Kinds. More recently, Jennifer Close's The Smart One and Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins catapulted me into chaotic family-soaked gatherings (the latter was one of my favourite reads in 2013). Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group,
The cover of Christene A. Browne's Two Women pulled me back to a literary pilgrimage I made to Regent Park, in Toronto, after I read Rabindranath Maharaj's The Amazing Absorbing Boy. But Regent Park is not so much a character in this novel as the women themselves. Though, which two
You might think Struan is an unlikely setting for a novel. A town you can walk through in under ten minutes (even on slippery wintry surfaces). Knopf Canada, 2013 "Walking from one end of Struan to the other takes less than ten minutes. If you kept walking south
Listening to an interview with Amy Tan, for the Guardian book club, I was struck by the fact that she lifted many of the stories from her mother's life for the pages of her work. Yet, while reading Lives of the Family, it is easy to imagine so many of
