Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

By Susan Juby

My first exposure to the genre of junior chick-lit happened in an airport departure lounge. The girl sitting across from me was engrossed in her book. She was a tidy girl, ten-something, with a tidy ... Read More »

February 11, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Janice Kulyk Keefer

Literary history has tended to relegate New Zealand’s Katherine Mansfield to the fringes of modernism, despite the fact that as an expatriate living in London she lived very much within its maelstrom, moving easily among ... Read More »

February 11, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By James King

Many novels are written around real lives, ranging from books that are near-biographies of major figures to concoctions based upon a bare historical mention, such as Jacqueline Park’s 1997 The Secret Book of Grazia dei ... Read More »

February 11, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Mark Sinnett

The Border Guards belongs to an all-Canadian genre invented and polished by mystery writer Giles Blunt: the “ice noir.” Set among the Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence, the book is about two very different ... Read More »

February 11, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Gail Scott

My Paris is not for those who dislike grammatical experimentation. But for those who do enjoy playing with language, this memoir (billed as a novel) of six months in Paris in 1993 is a pleasure.The ... Read More »

February 11, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Keith Maillard

The rich optimism of 1950s postwar America is sensually and eloquently evoked in Keith Maillard’s Gloria, the third book in his acclaimed Raysburg series.Behind the affluent facade of the West Virginia steel town of Raysburg, ... Read More »

February 11, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Natalee Caple

What does it mean to work for a living when money corresponds only to “the expectations of the people who handle it”? This is the question that drives much of Natalee Caple’s second novel, a ... Read More »

February 11, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels