Margaret Sweatman0.0 When Alice Lay Down with Peter, Margaret Sweatman's third novel, is an entirely original history of the Canadian Prairies from the early years of buffalo hunting and rebellion through to 1970. Blondie, the wry narrator, recounts the story of four feisty women: her mother, Alice; Blondie herself; her stunningly beautiful daughter, Helen; and her artist granddaughter, Dianna. In her 109 years, Blondie has seen it all, from the hanging of Louis Riel to Helen's death in the Spanish Civil War.
Assorted husbands, a banker, a monk, a communist, and several ghosts also make appearances, lending this marvellous literary confection set in Southern Manitoba's Red River Valley a magical, eccentric atmosphere. Recurring floods and lightning bolts at the moment of conception add to the rollicking mix, which Sweatman narrates with rare skill and humour: "Eli looked at the corn as a Zen Buddhist would examine a screwdriver." She delights in the way words flood their banks and find new channels through the flatlands: "My mother's laughter, those nine months, came from the place where happiness and a nearly intolerable ache live together." The beauty of her language never wavers. It is consistently inventive and, with the strong story, lifts this novel to another level. Highly recommended. --Mark Frutkin
Alice Munro3.9 In these stories lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as Alice Munro's characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind and boxed away, it's as if they have never been - until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways.
There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second chances - here are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on and can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered.
Рут Элизабет Милс0.0 Short-listed for the 2001 Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize and the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Prize Lilith Boot’s life changes forever the night she drowns the flowers in her parents’ garden. Frightened by their daughter’s odd behaviour, and her recent pronouncements of psychic visions, the Boots send Lilith to a Vancouver mental hospital. It is there that she becomes pregnant, giving birth after her discharge. Years later, Lilith uses her visions to help Toronto police find missing children. At the same time, her own daughter, Lemon, struggles to distinguish herself from her quirky mother. Searching for her identity, she sets off across the country in search of the father she has never met. In the process, both Lilith and Lemon discover that they can never escape from the past – or each other. This debut novel introduces an astonishing new voice to the Canadian literary scene. With fresh, inspiring language, and characters who steal your heart, Elizabeth Ruth weaves together an unforgettable story of loss and landscape of memory.
Timothy Taylor0.0 A love story wrapped in a murder mystery.
Jeremy Papier is a Vancouver chef and restaurateur who owns a bistro called The Monkey's Paw. The novel uses a "Bloods vs. Crips" metaphor for the philosophical conflict between chefs such as Papier, who favour local ingredients and menus, and those such as his nemesis Dante Beale, who favour a hip, globalized, "post-national" fusion cuisine.
Papier also endures conflict with his father, an anthropologist studying homelessness in Vancouver's Stanley Park, who draws him into investigating the death of two children in the park.
Томас Уортон0.0 Spellbinding, original, Salamander careens through a world of ideas and stories in which the transforming power of books, the thirst for knowledge, and the pursuit of immortality become erotic. It is also a universal story of love and obsession. Set in the eighteenth century, the narrative revolves around a world-spanning quest for the infinite book. Along the way the novel gathers stories that range from a Chinese tale of jealousy and lost love to the remarkable history of Alexandria’s other great library and to epoch-making moments on the battlefields of colonial America. At the centre of the novel’s unforgettable cast of characters is the London printer Nicholas Flood, a dedicated craftsman who is unprepared for all that awaits him when he accepts an unusual commission. Intricate, humane, infused with humour and pathos, Salamander is an exhilarating, elegantly crafted novel.
