Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

By M.G. Vassanji

The strength of M.G. Vassanji’s new novel, his first since 1994’s The Book of Secrets, is that it has the urgency of television news. That is its fatal weakness too, for like television news, it ... Read More »

February 2, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Kate Pullinger

Unlike trashy films and television shows, which may at least offer inadvertent humour or cautionary insight into plastic surgery, escapist fiction is often dull. The novels of Harold Robbins, Judith Krantz, or Jackie Collins make ... Read More »

February 2, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Genni Gunn

Kate Mason, the central character in Vancouver author Genni Gunn’s third novel, Tracing Iris, has a life even the worst-off won’t envy. Abandoned at an early age by her mother, Kate’s spent the majority of ... Read More »

February 2, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Kelley Armstrong

Elena, a successful magazine writer in downtown Toronto, is keeping a secret from her live-in lover: a biological clock compels her to change into a wolf and run unhindered through the city’s parks and ravines ... Read More »

February 2, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By George Szanto

Jorge, a Canadian professor of criminology, is honeymooning in west central Mexico with Rissa, his second wife, and her 10-year-old daughter, Kikki. He’s also pursuing, on behalf of PEN Canada, the case of Mono Loro, ... Read More »

February 2, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Sandra Birdsell

Imagination thrives on history and geography, and Sandra Birdsell’s imagination is fecund. The Russländer is her fifth book and the first to probe her maternal ancestral origins, her Mennonite roots in Russia. Birdsell – who ... Read More »

February 2, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels