Quill and Quire

By Rob Payne

One of the challenges facing the contemporary novelist is to capture the complexities and absurdities of modern life without boring the reader. Rob Payne manages to do this and make us laugh too. In Working ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Douglas Coupland

Hey Nostradamus! is one of Douglas Coupland’s minor-key efforts. It doesn’t have the operatic heft of All Families Are Psychotic or the poppin’ fresh teen spirit of such earlier works as Microserfs. If anything, Coupland ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Andrea MacPherson

When She Was Electric, a first novel from Vancouver author Andrea MacPherson, suffers from a sense of familiarity, a reliance on structural clichés that damages, almost irrevocably, this otherwise interesting debut. MacPherson’s narrative treads perilously ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Helen McLean

Edward Cooper begins life in near-Dickensian circumstances, in a single room on Brunswick Avenue in Depression-era Toronto. Though he and his pretty, unmarried English mother have only each other and a meagre allowance from her ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels