Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

★ Pavel & I

By Dan Vyleta

Pavel Richter, the meek yet oddly alluring protagonist of Dan Vyleta’s debut novel, seems to have an innate talent for suffering. A former American G.I., Pavel is still living in Berlin two years after the ... Read More »

September 26, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

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By Austin Clarke

When Austin Clarke confounded the oddsmakers and walked away with the 2002 Giller Prize for his novel The Polished Hoe, murmurs spread through some of Canada’s tonier, gated literary communities that the wrong writer had ... Read More »

September 22, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Good to a Fault

By Marina Endicott

If an insurance agent causes a car accident, what’s her liability? At first blush, it sounds like a bad joke. Yet it’s this question of liability and damages – automotive, spiritual, and otherwise – that ... Read More »

September 15, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ What They Wanted

By Donna Morrissey

Readers were enthralled by the difficult yet somehow fulfilling life of the title character and his fragile bride in Donna Morrissey’s Commonwealth Prize-nominated 2005 novel Sylvanus Now. This sequel shifts the focus to Sylvanus and ... Read More »

September 15, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Ravine

By Paul Quarrington

Here’s an interesting question: when does stylistic inventiveness cease being an adventurous literary approach and become merely chaotic and contrived? In this, his 10th novel, Paul Quarrington goes out of his way to keep his ... Read More »

August 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Hidden City

By Michelle West

Fans of award-winning Toronto fantasy writer Michelle West will be delighted with this return to the vivid and detailed universe of the Sacred Hunt and the Sun Sword series. Hidden City begins a new series ... Read More »

August 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Girls Fall Down

By Maggie Helwig

The contemporary urban experience is not a subject that dominates Canadian fiction. A quick scan of the bestseller lists and awards shortlists of recent years reveals the firm dominance of novels set in the past, ... Read More »

August 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Flirt: The Interviews

By Lorna Jackson

The conceit behind Lorna Jackson’s slim new volume of fiction is a series of phony encounters between an unnamed middle-aged female interviewer and eight celebrities culled mainly from the worlds of hockey and literature, including ... Read More »

August 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Coventry

By Helen Humphreys

Similar to her 2002 novel, The Lost Garden, Helen Humphreys’ sixth novel is concerned with finding one’s bearings in a world made unrecognizable by war. During the Second World War, on the night of the ... Read More »

August 25, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels