Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

Helpless

By Barbara Gowdy

Like much of Barbara Gowdy’s previous work, Helpless is a love story. It is far from a straightforward one, however. Instead, Gowdy takes readers into the world of a child-abducting pedophile. We watch Ron, an ... Read More »

March 22, 2007 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Adam’s Peak

By Heather Burt

Two families live side by side in a middle-class Montreal neighbourhood: the Frasers, who emigrated from Scotland in the 1960s, and the Vantwests, who left life on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) ... Read More »

March 22, 2007 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Rollback

By Robert J. Sawyer

In Rollback, bestselling Toronto science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer explores both the nature of time and the questions surrounding the scientific ability to fundamentally alter the human lifespan. In the process, he also delves deeply ... Read More »

March 12, 2007 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Orphan Love

By Nadia Bozak

The characters in Nadia Bozak’s first novel are bashed up and beaten down, disappointed and disenfranchised. The story follows a runaway punker named Bozak – who is presumably not the author but a character with ... Read More »

February 26, 2007 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Garcia’s Heart

By Liam Durcan

With this remarkable debut novel, Liam Duncan, a neurologist and the author of the much-lauded short story collection A Short Journey by Car (2004), has firmly ensconced himself within the hallowed ranks of doctors making ... Read More »

February 19, 2007 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Outcast

By José Latour

Eliot Steil, the antihero at the centre of José Latour’s wonderful new mystery, was born in 1950 to a Cuban mother and an American father, a businessman in the sugar industry. Young Eliot and his ... Read More »

February 12, 2007 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

King

By Tanya Chapman

There are many reasons why stories told from the perspective of teens and early twentysomethings can falter in the eyes of older readers. When you’re young, life is full of superlatives, everything seems exciting and ... Read More »

January 31, 2007 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels