Quill and Quire

BOOK REVIEWS

★ Forde Abroad

By John Metcalf

John Metcalf has not published a stand-alone book of fiction in some 10 years. This is unfortunate, because he is one of Canada’s best writers. With the publication of Forde Abroad, a brilliant 80-page novella, ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Promiscuous Unbound

By Bex Brian

For a novel that seems to promise sensual candour if not outright licentiousness, the only truly shocking thing about Promiscuous Unbound, Bex Brian’s debut novel, is just how modest it turns out to be. Although ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Significant Things

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

When She Was Electric

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

A Foreign Field

By Gillian Chan

During the Second World War, the Royal Air Force ran a flight training school in the town of Hagersville, Ontario. The school is one of the two main backdrops for Gillian Chan’s new novel; the ... Read More »

November 24, 2003