Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

In Calamity’s Wake

By Natalee Caple

In the “note on pastiche sources” that follows the conclusion of Natalee Caple’s unconventional Old West family drama, the author calls the book a “metahistoriographic fiction.” Caple’s mash-up blends the real and the invented, the ... Read More »

June 18, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Caught

By Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore, whose novel February won this year’s Canada Reads competition, has the ability to perfectly capture an emotional moment. At the outset of her third novel, Caught, David Slaney has escaped the prison that ... Read More »

June 17, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Empty Room

By Lauren B. Davis

Lauren B. Davis’s fourth novel tells the story of Colleen Kerrigan, a relatively unremarkable middle-aged secretary who is single and childless. Colleen is also a full-blown alcoholic. The novel takes place over a single day. ... Read More »

June 10, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Matadora

By Elizabeth Ruth

What does it mean to be a woman? To be alive? In her audacious third novel, Elizabeth Ruth examines such grand, universal questions through an historically specific mise-en-scène. Set in the days before the Spanish ... Read More »

May 13, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Bone and Bread

By Saleema Nawaz

Five years after Mother Superior, her breakthrough collection of short stories, Saleema Nawaz returns with a big and beautiful novel set in Montreal and Ottawa. While there’s much travelling in this book  – through time ... Read More »

April 22, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Firebird

By Susanna Kearsley

Successfully blending a contemporary romance with an historical adventure is no easy task, but in The Firebird, author Susanna Kearsley goes one step further, bestowing supernatural abilities upon her protagonist. Since birth, Nicola Marter has ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Under Budapest

By Ailsa Kay

The legacy of Soviet aggression against Hungary is very much apparent in Ailsa Kay’s arresting debut novel. While the book’s early chapters resemble a treatise on how academia and “lived experience” are liable to interpret ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels