Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

Smoke Show

By Clint Burnham

Writers as disparate as Shakespeare, Dickens, Hemingway, Joyce, Céline, V.S. Naipaul, and Flannery O’Connor used colloquial lower-middle- and working-class speech as an animating force in their work, reveling in its loose-limbed flexibility and vivid metaphoricity, ... Read More »

December 19, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Treading Water

By Anne DeGrace

Historical fiction is tricky. Successful books in the genre blend equal amounts of fact with fiction, while others provide just enough background to set the scene and provide context. Ultimately, it is the reader who ... Read More »

November 22, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Field of Mars

By Stephen Miller

Russian mystery and thriller writers are currently doing extremely well in the West, most notably Boris Akunin – two of whose policiers are being turned into feature films – and Yulia Latynina, whose stinging odes ... Read More »

November 22, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ April Fool

By William Deverell

Arthur Ransome Beauchamp has risen yet again. The fusty, feisty, now-retired lawyer is alive and reasonably well on his Garibaldi Island home in William Deverell’s new novel, April Fool.The action begins when Nick “The Owl” ... Read More »

November 18, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The City Man

By Howard Akler

Howard Akler’s debut novel, The City Man, is an engrossing and entertaining quick read. Part crime novel, part love story, The City Man is set in Toronto over three months in 1934. Swiftly moving scenes, ... Read More »

November 18, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Anomaly

By Anne Fleming

Good novels about Toronto are hard to come by. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje is one, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye is another. Anne Fleming’s publishers would like to promote this first ... Read More »

October 26, 2005 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels