Quill and Quire

BOOK REVIEWS

By Althea Prince

With Loving This Man, her first novel, Althea Prince follows other West Indian-Canadian authors (Dionne Brand, Rabindranath Maharaj, Austin Clarke) in exploring the trauma of emigration. The first half of the novel is set in ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Jeff Wells

Reflecting back on his life, twentysomething Gideon Gast finds that, when it comes right down to it, he’s spent most of his time “in anticipation and remembrance of sex.” Caught between his born-again mom and ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Gerald Lynch

On opening night at a strip club in the Troutstream Arms, a performer with the evocative name of Burnadette is nearly incinerated when her spectacular Joan of Arc routine goes awry. As the patrons gawk, ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Mark Macdonald

Vancouver author Mark Macdonald’s first novel, Flat, transformed the architecture of the apartment building into an effective and subtle symbol for, amongst other things, the essential strangeness of urban life. Desire, compartmentalized and isolated inside ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

By Bill Richardson

In Waiting for Gertrude, Vancouver writer, broadcaster, and notorious cat-fancier Bill Richardson envisions Paris’s famed Père-Lachaise Cemetery as inhabited by the souls of its notable occupants reincarnated into the bodies of feral cats. Chopin has ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

By Nadine McInnis

The 14 stories in Nadine McInnis’s Quicksilver are linked by a spectrum of characters somehow experiencing revelations in the midst of suspended lives. Mercury, the rare metal also known as “quicksilver,” is a recurrent image, ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short