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Lee Smith
The Last Girls
From Publishers
Weekly
Readers will be thoroughly captivated by Ivy Rowe,
the narrator of this epistolary novel, and will come to the end of her
story with a pang of regret. Smith ( Oral History , Family Linen ) has
produced her best work here, creating a fully rounded heroine and
other vivid characters who inhabit Virginia's Appalachia region. The
letters begin around the turn of the century when Ivy is a child
living with eight siblings on the family farm on Blue Star Mountain.
Written with quaint misspellings and in the vernacular of Southern
speech, the missives reflect the harsh poverty of farm life, as well
as the simple beauties of the land: "This is the taste of
spring," her father tells Ivy, and she never forgets it, even
when the family must move to the boom town of Majestic after her
father's death. Ivy's talent as a budding writer is recognized early
on, but just as she is about to realize her dream of going North to
school, she is betrayed by her passionate nature. Though pregnant and
"ruint," she marries a childhood friend who takes her back
to the family homestead, where she bears several children and endures
the endless toil of a farmer's wife. Just when life seems drearily
predictable, she succumbs in middle age to an irresistible passion
that brings tragic consequences. Ivy is a woman of bewitching appeal
and endearing faults: bright, with a poet's eye and soul; spunky,
impetuous, sensual and proud. Following her heroine over seven
decades, Smith conveys the changing conditions of life in Appalachia,
during which time, as Ivy laments, "everybody has took everything
out of here first the trees, then the coal, then the children." In
the old tradition of oral storytelling, Smith has fashioned a
dramatic, magical, poignantly true-to-life tale. Literary Guild
selection.
Price: $22.95
Sabine Durrant
The Great Indoors
It’s not that Martha Bone doesn’t like
children. It’s more that they don’t fit into her world: her
shop, with its succession of beautiful distressed antiques; her
flat, with its creamy sofa, its unwashable linen scatter-cushions,
its aura of oatmeal and sand. Her sisters don’t understand how she
can live her life as she does, shut away like that, so emotionally
enclosed, but Martha smoothes the Durham quilt on her Victorian
cast-iron bed and thinks everything looks just fine. More than fine.
Perfect.
But then things start happening. A death. A cat.
A girl with chocolately fingers. A box of old letters. The
re-emergence of an old boyfriend. Martha begins to investigate her
past and discovers you can only paper over the cracks for so long.
Sabine Durrant’s sharp humour and wit mark her out as a brilliant
new voice in women’s fiction.
Price: $14.99
Lesley Anne Cowan
As She Grows
As She Grows is the affecting story of
Snow, just 16, whose life has been troubled from the start. She lives
with her grandmother, a well-intentioned but ineffectual, mentally ill
alcoholic. Her mother, an apparent victim of drowning shortly after
Snow's birth, is both a haunting and comforting presence in Snow's
life.
Snow's family troubles seem destined to send her on
the same downward spiral, especially when she learns she is pregnant.
Will she end up like her mother and grandmother, her life wrecked on
the shoals of good intentions and poor judgment?
As She Grows explores, in luminous and
accomplished prose, the boundaries between mother and daughter,
destiny and choice, nature and nurture-and the line between choosing
your life and your life choosing you. It's a line, Snow discovers,
that's very nearly invisible-so invisible one nearly stumbles over it
About the Author
Lesley Anne Cowan has a B.A. in English Literature
and a Diploma in Education from McGill
University. She is also a graduate of the Humber School for Writers
and has her short fiction published in The Antigonish Review as well
as the anthologies Ten Stories High and She's Gonna Be. She Currently
resides in Toronto, where she is a secondary school teacher working
with at-risk youth.
Price: $24.00
Rachael Preston
Tent of Blue
In
her richly conceived first novel, Rachael Preston creates characters
who are trapped by cruelty, poverty, war, and their own minds and
bodies, and she exposes their gradual awakening to the fact that they
carry within themselves the possibility of freedom and the power to
achieve it. In 1952, Anton, a lonely fifteen-year-old with a club
foot, and Yvonne, his mother, a former English music hall dancer, live
in a Vancouver mansion-turned-apartment-house, where Yvonne operates a
ballet school. Both have been imprisoned by fear, by physical
limitations, and by their own misery.
"The
story of a boy and his mother striving to create themselves as they
learn to live heroically, despite the scathing violence of love.
A novel that lingers long after the final page." Shauna Singh
Baldwin, author of What the Body Remembers
Tent
of Blue is a story of captivity and escape, of
discovering the strength to fight back against the world and seize
freedom.
In 1952, Anton, a lonely fifteen-year-old with a club
foot, and Yvonne, his mother, a former English music hall dancer, live
in a Vancouver mansion-turned-apartment-house where Yvonne operates a
shabby little ballet school. Both have been imprisoned all their
lives. Yvonne’s prison is fear: fear of her grotesquely abusive
mother, of losing her lover, and of Harold, the brutal impresario who
sweeps her into his control and makes her his wife. Anton has been a
prisoner of his physical handicap, of Yvonne’s misery, and of Harold’s
hold on both of them.
Yvonne’s and Anton’s stories are told in alternating chapters.
Yvonne’s begins in 1935, when she’s fourteen, and continues until
1950, when she takes the step that makes the present possible. Anton’s
follows his struggle for respect and independence through the summer
of 1952, when he befriends a wheelchair-bound First World War pilot
and causes a harrowing yet funny crisis that brings mother and son a
little closer while leaving the reader in an emotional turmoil.
Price: $22.95
Alice Sebold
Lovely Bones
When we first meet Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. As she looks down
from this strange new place, she tells us, in the fresh and spirited voice of a
fourteen-year-old girl, a tale that is both haunting and full of hope.
In the weeks following her death, Susie watches life on Earth continuing
without her -- her school friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her
family holding out hope that she'll be found, her killer trying to cover his
tracks. As months pass without leads, Susie sees her parents' marriage being
contorted by loss, her sister hardening herself in an effort to stay strong, and
her little brother trying to grasp the meaning of the word gone.
And she explores the place called heaven. It looks a lot like her school
playground, with the good kind of swing sets. There are counselors to help
newcomers adjust and friends to room with. Everything she ever wanted appears as
soon as she thinks of it-except the thing she most wants: to be back with the
people she loved on Earth.
With compassion, longing, and a growing understanding, Susie sees her loved
ones pass through grief and begin to mend. Her father embarks on a risky quest
to ensnare her killer. Her sister undertakes a feat of remarkable daring. And
the boy Susie cared for moves on, only to find himself at the center of a
miraculous event.
The Lovely Bones is luminous and astonishing, a novel that builds
out of grief the most hopeful of stories. In the hands of a brilliant new
writer, this story of the worst thing a family can face is transformed into a
suspenseful and even funny novel about love, memory, joy, heaven, and
healing.
Price: $29.95
Tony Parsons
Man & Boy
HE HAD TO FACE THE TOUGHEST JOB OF HIS LIFE. AND HE NEVER ONCE
THOUGHT HE'D BE ON HIS OWN.
Harry had it all: a beautiful wife, an adorable
four-year-old son, and a high-paying media job. But on the eve of his
thirtieth birthday, with one irresponsible act, he threw it all away.
Suddenly he finds himself an unemployed single father trying to figure
out how to wash his son's hair the way Mommy did and whether green
spaghetti is proper breakfast food. This brilliantly engaging novel
will tug at your heart as Harry learns to become a father to his son
and a son to his aging father, takes stabs at finding new love, and
makes the hardest decision of his life.
Price: $19.50
Dennis McFarland
Singing Boy
On a March night in a quiet Boston neighborhood, Malcolm Vaughn, who is on his
way home from a Historical Society dinner, is gunned down by a stranger while
his wife and son watch. So begins Dennis McFarland's deeply interesting
examination of grief. Demonstrating an uncanny ability to penetrate two very
different psyches, the author focuses on the dead man's widow, Sarah Vaughn, and
his best friend, Deckard Jones. The latter is a Vietnam veteran and former
addict who's in the midst of his own unraveling as the novel begins. This
blue-collar black man may seem like an unusual friend for the white, comfortably
middle-class Vaughn family, yet McFarland's writing makes the relationship
perfectly plausible.
It's a well-known phenomenon that a common loss doesn't necessarily bring
people together. Employing a Rashomon-like alternation of voices, McFarland
explores the same events from both Deckard's and Sarah's point of view. These
two devastated people have nothing but good will toward each other, and both are
worried about 8-year-old Harry and perplexed by his withdrawal and regression.
Somehow, though, they can't avoid giving--and taking--offense.
An intensely subjective and surreal tone illuminates the interior lives of
both of these characters. Sarah guiltily takes sleeping pills and muscle
relaxants that make her "too groggy to drive the car and a little apprehensive
in the kitchen, among sharp knives and open flames." Deckard, meanwhile, is
having trouble with "a struggle for proper nouns, a tendency to leave his
apartment without the keys, the habit of arriving in a room clueless about what
brought him there." He's also haunted by his memories of Vietnam, a part of the
novel that takes on a life of its own and leaves the reader wanting more.
Indeed, there's an immediacy and an edgy humor to this side of the story that's
missing from Sarah's more pastel journey. But Singing Boy is everywhere a
work of unclichéd compassion, with the sometimes surprising revelation of
goodness discovered in unexpected places
About
the Author
Dennis McFarland is the bestselling author of
The Music Room, School for the Blind and A Face At The Window. His
fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and The New
Yorker. He lives with his family in Massachusetts.
Price: $20.00
Bill Gaston
The Good Body
Award-winning Bill Gaston’s breakthrough novel, The Good Body, is a
triumphant blend of mordant humour and heartbreak. Spurred on by, yet ignoring,
a disease that may be killing him, just retired hockey ruffian Bobby Bonaduce
lies his way into grad school in order to return to New Brunswick to lay
emotional claim to the son he abandoned twenty years before. This is a sad/comic
account of a middle-aged, multiple-sclerosis stricken, former athlete. A
little-educated mesomorph struggling with postmodern discourse, a lonely man
hunting down a semblance of family, Bonaduce is the last to know that he is not
wanted back in town. With one of the most distinctive characters of recent
fiction, written with precision and grace, The Good Body fulfills the
claim that Bill Gaston dwells “in the company of Findley, Atwood and Munro as
one of this country’s outstanding literary treasures.” (The Globe and Mail)
about the author:
Bill Gaston is the author of The Good
Body, Deep Cove Stories, Tall Lives, North of Jesus’
Beans, The Cameraman, and a book of poetry, Inviting
Blindness. He is the author of two plays, Yardsale and I am
Danielle Steel, and a screenplay, The New Brunswicker. He lives in
Victoria, British Columbia
Price: $25.00
Libby Schmais
The Perfect Elizabeth
This modern day Sense
and Sensibility is a witty story about two sisters: Liza, a would
be poet who spends miserable days as a legal secretary: and Bette, a
graduate student writing her dissertation on Toast in the English
Novel. Bette has taken to eating only what the characters she is
writing about would eat: boiled eggs on toast, mincemeat, nice cups of
tea.... Liza's a bit concerned. She's also worried about the status of
her relationship with her actor boyfriend, Gregor. They're not living
together, and that's a problem.
Then there's the issue of
Liza's career, or the lack thereof. Can dog walking be considered a
vocation? Liza's beginning to think so. Mercifully, Bette is merely a
local phone call away.
Throughout this
hilarious novel, the sisters deal with unemployment, infidelity,
interfering parents, Hollywood, lemmings, a pregnancy, and wedding. The
Perfect Elizabeth is as indulgent and cathartic as a pint of
Haagen-Dazs
Price: $17.95
Reading group guide inside
 Richard Scrimger
Mystical Rose
"Beautiful... Mystical Rose should be on everybody's reading list" -The Globe and Mail
In this remarkable novel, Richard Scrimger conjures the fragility of life and memory
through a wholly convincing portrait, by turns hilarious and poignant, of a dying Rose Rolyoke. Set primarily in Southern Ontario, with brief stops in Philadelphia and New
York City, Mystical Rose spans most of the twentieth century. Rose tells her story in what appear to be flashbacks, and in conversation with God, who stands at her bedside. Past and future, fact and allegory, what was and what might have been are all blended
together. Easy for God, the All Seeing, who strides through time as if it were a familiar living room. Harder for Rose, lost in the
darkness, who wonders if she loved her daughter well enough--or if she herself was ever truly loved.
"Rose Rolyoke, the protagonist of Richard Scrimger's new novel Mystical Rose, stands in the heady company of Margaret Laurence's Hagar Shipley and Carol Shield's Daisy Goodwill...Scrimger exerts such confident control over his material that any memories of The Stone
Angel or The Stone Diaries eventually vanish. The
life of Rose Rolyoke becomes a world unto itself, a world into which the reader is privileged to be invited. Mystical Rose is a book of true beauty and grace, delicately balanced and nuanced."-Quill & Quire
Price: $17.95
Alison Weir
Eleanore of Aquitaine
By the Wrath of God, Queen of
England
Fascinating story
Queen of France, Queen of England, mother to ten
children who became kings & queens themselves, she was a most
influential woman, especially for the 12th century. She was also
imprisoned for 16 years, had two horrible marriages, was kept from her
eldest children and had other children that tried
to kill each other. Yet
she overcame all to rule England at the age of 67 and lived to be 82. So
extraordinary it could only be true.
Price: $24.95
David Ebershoff
The Danish Girl
"A bizarre and engrossing story of shifting identities, loyalty and love...Wild,
riveting and just a little bit frightening...fascinating... the Danish Girl is a striking novelistic debut." -New York Post
Set against the glitz and decadence of the 1920s Copenhagen, Dresden, and Paris, this stunning first novel explores the boundaries of sex and gender, love and
marriage.
Inspired by the true story of Danish painter Einar Wegener and his California-born wife, this tender portrait of a
marriage asks: What do you do when someone you love wants to change?
It starts with a simple question, a simple favor asked of a husband by his wife on an afternoon chilled by the Baltic wind while both are painting in their studio.
Her portrait model has canceled; would he slip into a pair of women's shoes and stockings for a few moments so she can finish the painting on time? "Of course," he answers
"Anything at all." With that, one of the most passionate and unusual love stories of the twentieth century begins.
Penguin Readers Guide inside each book including Discussion Questions and Interview with the author.
Jody Shields
The Fig Eater
Hypnotic.. The Fig Eater abounds with sensual pleasures... Satisfying as a nuts and bolts story of detective work in early twentieth century Vienna, the novel also leaves us
with the haunting
sense that we can approach the truth only by opening our minds to more than one way of knowing.-
Maria Russo Salon.com
Vienna, 1910. The hunt for a killer begins in the darkness of a hot August night, when an eighteen year old girl named Dora (loosely inspired by Freud's
famous patient) is found brutally murdered near the Imperial Place....
Hailed as one of the most remarkable literary debuts of recent years, The Fig Eater
is at once a page turning tale of murder, sleuthing, and sexual secrets and a rich, glittering evocation of a city and a culture in fateful transition.
Readers Guide inside each book including Discussion Questions and Interview with the author.
Price: $19.95
Lorna Landvik
Patty Jane's House Of Curl
"Fun and funny,
spiked with tragedy and sad times."
--USA Today
Maybe Patty Jane Dobbin should know better than to marry a man as gorgeous as
Thor Rolvaag, but she's too smitten to think twice. Yet nine months into their
marriage, with a baby on the way, Thor is gone. It's a good thing Patty Jane has
her irrepressible sister Harriet to rely on--not to mention her extremely short,
extremely rich almost-brother-in-law, Avel Ames.
It's been said that a good haircut can cure any number of ills, and before
long the Minnesota sisters have opened a neighborhood beauty parlor complete
with live harp music and an endless supply of delicious Norwegian baked goods.
It's a wonderful, warm-hearted place where you can count on good friends, lots
of laughter, tears, and comfort when you need it--and the unmistakable scent of
someone getting a permanent wave. . . .
Reading Group discussion guide at back of book
Price: $21.00
Alice Hoffman
The River King
People tend to stay in
their place in the town of Haddan. The students at the prestigious prep school
don't mix with locals; even within the school, hierarchy rules as freshmen and
faculty members find out where they fit in and what is expected from them. But
there are minor collisions happening everywhere:
An awkward boy, the son of a teacher, is flirting with
a pretty classmate, the daughter of a convenience-store cashier. A photographer
in plastic flip-flops and an overflowing backpack is about to marry a staid,
ambitious historian. And when a body is found in the river behind the school, a
local policeman named Abel Grey will walk into this enclosed world and upset it
entirely.... From the acclaimed author of Practical
Magic and Local Girls,
this is a story of surface appearances and the
truths submerged below--confirming Alice Hoffman's place as "one of our
quirkiest and most interesting novelists" (Jane Smiley, USA Today).
Reading Group discussion guide online
Penguin
Putnam
Price: $20.00
Glen Davis Gold
Carter Beats The Devil
America in the 1920s was a nation obsessed with magic. Not just the kind
performed in theaters and on stages across the country, but the magic of
technology, science, and prosperity. Enter Charles Carter -- a.k.a. Carter the
Great -- a young master performer whose skill as an illusionist exceeds even
that of the great Houdini. Fueled by a passion for magic that grew out of
desperation and loneliness, Carter has become a legend in his own time. His
thrilling act involves outrageous stunts carried out on elaborate sets before
the most demanding audiences. But the most outrageous stunt of all stars none
other than President Warren Harding and ends up nearly costing Carter the
reputation he worked so hard to create. Filled with historical references that
evoke the excesses and enthusiasm of postwar, pre-Depression America, Carter
Beats the Devil is the complex and illuminating story of one man's journey
through a magical -- and sometimes dangerous -- world, where illusion is
everything, and everything is illusory.
Price: $34.95
Nega Mezlekia
The God Who Begat A Jackal
Although Count Ashenafi commanded power and influence that transcended the
bounds of the visible world, for many years his desire for a child remained
unfulfilled. When his third wife finally gave birth to a beautiful daughter, his
joy was boundless. He called his child Aster, a name vague in meaning, yet
delicately majestic; achingly vivid, woefully elusive. And so Aster proved to
be.
Aster possessed talents from the world beyond, enabling her to speak in
languages no one but the birds could understand and to walk through solid walls.
Soon a brilliant scholar and mind-reader, Aster is kept under guard to protect
her from those who might mean her harm. Her guard is Gudu, a kind but illiterate
young man. Aster teaches him to read and write, and the inevitable complications
arise.
In this epic tale of forbidden love, we find a world inhabited by wandering
souls suspended between the dead and living, and by jealous widow spirits
waiting to snatch a child. The landscape of endless steppes is alive with acacia
trees, the sun-bleached bones of elephants, wildebeest, giraffes and zebras, and
twisters forming huge pillars of dust that vanish as quickly as they arise.
Steeped in African folklore and set against a backdrop of class, ethnic and
religious struggles in pre-colonial Africa, The God Who Begat a Jackal is
filled with extravagant surprises and a glorious sense of destiny. In this
strange and seductive world where magic and politics, tall tales and religion,
secret passions and military battles are woven together, Nega Mezlekia has
created an utterly original, unforgettable and captivating
story.
About the author
Nega Mezlekia left Ethiopia in 1983 with little more than the clothes he was
wearing. A professional engineer with degrees from Addis Ababa University, the
University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, the University of Waterloo and
McGill University, he now lives in Toronto. This is his first novel. His memoir
Notes From the Hyena’s Belly won the 2000 Governor General’s Award for
Non-Fiction.
Rave reviews
"In the way he focuses his theme, yet spins a complex tale, in the way he
draws clear parallels with modern horrors, Mezlekia has written an epic that
rumbles with the strength of Shakespearean drama….This isn't just a story about
war, it's a story about wars that we are witnessing in our lifetime, whether we
are paying them heed or not."
-- The Edmonton Journal
"The God Who Begat a Jackal weaves a spell-binding web of fabulous
dreams and laughter, propelled by diamond-sharp images and a liberal sprinkling
of witty, unpretentious remarks…a delight so rich with laughter and jeweled
moments of beauty…"
-- The Vancouver Sun
"He shows a powerful command of language, with descriptions that are lush and
detailed, as well as coherent...Mezlekia's true achievement is in depicting a
pre-scientific age, where diviners are called to solve human problems and animal
sacrifices are the order of the day, all the while retaining some relevance to
our modern age."
-- The Calgary Herald
Price: $25.00
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