Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

The Harem

By Safia Fazlul

Farina is the deeply cynical and unhappy daughter of Bangladeshi parents. Living in a Muslim ghetto in a large Canadian city, she eschews university and instead gets a full-time deli job to fund her independence. ... Read More »

January 3, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Painted Girls

By Cathy Marie Buchanan

Reminiscent of Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, Cathy Marie Buchanan’s second novel tells the fascinating story of the young 19th-century Parisian ballerina who posed for Edgar Degas’ famous sculpture Little Dancer, Aged ... Read More »

December 17, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Toploader

By Ed O’Loughlin

Toploader is an occasionally funny but ultimately flawed satire of American imperialism written very much in the spirit of Carl Hiaasen. What it takes from Hiaasen is the elaborate comic contraption of a plot driven ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Braco

By Lesleyanne Ryan

Covering five days following the fall of Srebrenica in 1995, Lesleyanne Ryan’s debut novel provides a potent – and extremely graphic – look at ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. Ryan tells the story via ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Sweet Girl

By Annabel Lyon

The opening pages of Annabel Lyon’s second novel feature seven-year-old Pythias, the daughter of Aristotle, dissecting a lamb under her father’s watchful gaze. The young girl, almost preternaturally curious, has been denied the right to ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: 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