Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

★ Room

By Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue steps outside of her comfort zone with Room, her new novel. The Irish-born novelist, who now makes her home in London, Ontario, is known primarily for her richly detailed historical fiction (such as ... Read More »

September 7, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Annabel

By Kathleen Winter

A universal concern – the importance of self-determination – takes a highly specific form in Kathleen Winter’s first novel, the story of an intersex child born in a remote coastal Labrador village in 1968. Intersex ... Read More »

August 30, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Real Gone

By Jim Christy

Real Gone is a meandering novella about a draft dodger in the 1960s who moves to Canada. Written by one-time American Jim Christy, who relocated to Canada in 1968, the book reads like a memoir. ... Read More »

August 30, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Find

By Kathy Page

Kathy Page’s latest novel opens with the discovery of an enormous prehistoric fossil in remote B.C. Anna Silowski, a renowned palaeontologist and consummate heartbreaker, is prospecting in the native community of Big Crow when, after ... Read More »

August 30, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Free Form Jazz

By Lee Lamothe

Loyalty – personal, professional, and, more often than not, criminal – is the abiding theme in Lee Lamothe’s novels, whether it’s an old-school Russian mobster determined to uphold the strict code of honour known as ... Read More »

August 30, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

JEW

By D.O. Dodd

JEW, the third novel by D.O. Dodd, is a disturbing and enigmatic account of identity, gender, and genocide. Dodd recontextualizes seemingly familiar historical atrocities to create an aesthetically challenging, profoundly disconcerting narrative. The novel begins ... Read More »

August 30, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Isobel & Emile

By Alan Reed

Meet Isobel and Emile. She’s a dark-haired, small-town jeune fille. He’s  the “strange boy from the city” who has temporarily set up shop in the tiny room above the local grocery store to concentrate on ... Read More »

August 30, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Ghost Brush

By Katherine Govier

A Katherine Govier book is as much history lesson as literary entertainment. In this, her ninth novel, Govier chronicles the life of a groundbreaking female artist in 19th-century Japan. Set against the backdrop of the ... Read More »

August 30, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

L (and things come apart)

By Ian Orti

There isn’t a pronounced anti-realist tradition in CanLit, despite isolated offerings from writers as diverse as Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers) and Stephen Marche (Shining at the Bottom of the Sea). For most fiction writers in ... Read More »

August 30, 2010 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels