"No, drinking oneself to death took too long." Harper Collins, 2013 Ironically, Colleen thinks this almost at the end of Lauren B. Davis' The Empty Room. But once a reader has resolved to begin, the narrative is so tightly constructed that readers are as caught in the momentum
The reader of Wayne Grady's first novel is held in as careful an embrace as the woman in the dancing couple on Emancipation Day's cover. Doubleday Canada - Random House Canada 2013 There is a sense that each word of the story has been chosen deliberately, even without
Oh, the trees! If you, like me, grew up with Anne and Emily naming and loving trees in L.M. Montgomery's novels, you will love Hilary Scharper's novel Perdita. Touchstone - Simon & Schuster, 2013 There are many other reasons to respond to this story: a love of history,
Shivan understands, years later, that his grandmother sees herself as the peréthi from the parable. She lives like a ghost, naked and hungry, surrounded by pleasures that she cannot enjoy. Doubleday - Random House, 2013 "Everything she touched, everything she loved, disintegrated in her hands." Readers benefit from Shivan's
Romola sang soprano, but perhaps an opera singer's life after she has retired is, by definition, incidental music. Or, perhaps the fragments of memory that swell and break for a 70-something woman living with dementia are incidental music. Or, the lost love she half-recalls? Maybe that is incidental. Inanna
