Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

Poison Shy

By Stacey Madden

The title of Stacey Madden’s debut novel refers to a term used in the extermination trade to describe how a pest learns to avoid poisons it has already encountered. In the human context the phrase ... Read More »

October 19, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Swallow

By Theanna Bischoff

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. Borrowing from the well-known children’s nursery rhyme, the opening lines of Theanna Bischoff’s second novel introduce a metaphor that unfolds as the story does. Darcy, a ... Read More »

October 16, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Milosz

By Cordelia Strube

In her ninth novel, Cordelia Strube continues to examine the complexities of contemporary life with equal doses comedy and misanthropy. Milo Krupi is an underemployed actor in his late thirties living in Toronto. His girlfriend ... Read More »

October 16, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Baggage

By Jill Sooley

No matter how loving its members may be, it’s the rare stepfamily that doesn’t have at least some messiness attached to it. In her second novel, Newfoundland’s Jill Sooley examines the delicate dynamics of one ... Read More »

October 16, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Song of Kosovo

By Chris Gudgeon

Song of Kosovo is half galloping Bildungsroman, half treatise on the fraught interplay of truth, lies, and myth in what we end up calling history. Zavida Zankovic, a Serb press-ganged into paramilitary service, finds himself ... Read More »

October 16, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Exit Papers from Paradise

By Liam Card

Isaac Sullivan has been bitter ever since his alcoholic father’s on-the-job mishap forced Isaac to quit high school and join the family plumbing business. At 36, the overly intelligent, underemployed plumber and aspiring doctor is ... Read More »

October 16, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Carnival

By Rawi Hage

At about the halfway point in Rawi Hage’s new novel, a taxi driver named Fly offers a ride to a stripper named Sally. After getting into the cab, Sally spots a copy of Jean Genet’s ... Read More »

September 19, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels