Olivia Manning, School for Love (Arrow, 2001)
First published in 1951, this novel is by one of Britain’s important mid-twentieth century writers, who is best known for The Balkan Trilogy, a compelling account of life in Cold War Bucharest. School for Love is set in Jerusalem, and traces the growing into adult sensibility of the teen-age orphan, Felix. He has led a […]
Kathleen Winter, Annabel (Anansi, 2010)
An extraordinarily lyrical novel set in Labrador, St John’s and Boston, the book traces the early life experience of Wayne Blake, a person born with the sexual organs of both man and woman. Marked by a generosity of spirit, and an openness to the complexities of identity, the story follows Wayne’s father as he tries […]
Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues (Thomas Allen, 2011)
Winner of the 2011 Giller Prize, this ambitious novel is set principally in the months leading up to the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War. Moving back and forth in time, and spanning settings in Baltimore, Berlin and Paris, the narrative focusses upon a jazz combo of African-American and German musicians. They […]
Alan Hollinghurst, A Stranger’s Child (Picador, 2011)
Hollinghurst burst onto the literary scene with a pair of acutely observed novels, The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty, the latter winning the Man Booker Prize in 2004. Both captured the oddly mixed flavour of excess and despair that marked late-twentieth century British society, and both contained much more graphic depictions of […]
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart, 2011)
Both autobiographical and fully imagined, this charming novel is Ondaatje at his most playful. Set on a ship travelling from Ceylon to England in the 1950s, the story is told by a writer who is now famous but who was once a passenger on a similar vessel, as a small boy, largely overlooked by those […]
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (Vintage Canada, 2010)
I was first introduced to Eggers through his zany family memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, one of the funniest books I have read. Zeitoun is the history of another family, tested beyond all reason by circumstance and bad public policy. The title character is a Syrian-American, married to a “white” Muslim convert. Together […]
Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December (Penguin Books, 1982)
Born in Lachine, Quebec, Bellow became the great chronicler of mid-twentieth century American (especially Chicago) life. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, his later writing becomes elegiac, and strongly focused on intimations of mortality. The Dean’s December, published in 1982, tells the story of a dyspeptic but relatively happily married dean of […]
Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam (Penguin Books, 2006)
One of the most difficult and troubling books I have ever read. Buruma grew up in Holland, but is half-British and has spent much of his recent years in the USA. He returns to Holland in 2004 to investigate the reasons that may have prompted the murder of controversial Dutch filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh. Van […]
Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander (Harper Collins, 2002)
O’Brian is often described as the greatest of historical novelists, mostly because of his superb research and encyclopedic knowledge of the Royal Navy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he can sometimes descend into excruciating detail (especially about the sails on a square-rigged ship!), what marks O’Brian’s greatness is his gift for rich […]
Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Harcourt Inc., 2005)
A powerful and lyrical memoir by one of Israel and the world’s great novelists. Probably best known for My Michael and Black Box, Oz tells a story of growing up in the 1940s and 50s in Jerusalem. One experiences a sense of both claustrophobic rigidity and utter liberation. His silent father was also a great […]
Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant (Harper Collins, 2008)
An exploration of the possibilities and impossibilities of cross cultural communication. Set at the moment of first contact between English naval officers and aborigines in Australia (1788), this beautiful novel is at once a bildungsroman, an adventure story, and a lyrical reflection on language. The relationship that evolves between Lieutenant Daniel Rooke and the child […]
Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus, 2010)
The most exquisite memoire I have ever read. Mr. de Waal, a distinguished English potter, traces his family history by exploring the movement of a collection of Japanese netsuke from late 19th century Paris, to Vienna at the Anschluss, to Tokyo, to London. The collection is first bought by Charles Ephrussi, the model for Proust’s […]
Paul Harding, Tinkers (Harper Collins, 2009)
As he lies dying, surrounded by his family, an amateur clock-repairer hallucinates about his own father who was largely absent. Astonishing writing that conjures up rural Maine in the 19th century, in all its harsh beauty. The characters are vivid, the central theme compelling: none of us can quite grasp the entirety of who we […]
Benjamin Perrin, Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking (Viking Canada, 2010)
A personal journey of civic engagement. A study of Canadians’ horrible contributions to human trafficking at home and abroad. A plea for concerted national and international action. Although the media tends to focus on trafficking for sexual exploitation, the even wider issue of forced labour should cause us equal concern. Gripping.
Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies (houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)
In a clever thematic inversion of James’s The Ambassadors, Ozick describes escaping children, a controlling father, and a bewildered aunt commisioned – much against her will – to sort out family troubles. All of the characters are deeply selfish, which makes it hard to feel much empathy, but the story holds intriguing, sometimes tragic, twists.
Kim Echlin, The Disappeared (Penguin Canada, 2009)
A lyrical exploration of family relationships created and undone in war. Searching for the ‘truth’ about one’s closest friends turns out to be heart-wrenching. Set convincingly in both Montreal and Cambodia, this is a delicate and moving portrayal of connection and loss.
Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart, 2009)
Canada’s and one of the world’s great stylists of language, Michaels is best known for the deeply moving Fugitive Pieces. The breadth of this book is remarkable, moving as it does between the flooding towns of the Saint Lawrence as the Seaway is built, to Montreal to Toronto to Egypt’s Valley of the Kings as […]
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton, 2005)
A romp through the politics of race and academic life. Brilliant riffs on affirmative action, fundamentalist Christianity and English usage, through explorations of the increasingly intertwined lives of two families where the fathers, two professors who work in the same area, detest one another. A hilarious and sad confrontation scene in a faculty meeting. Shortlisted […]
Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (Heinemann, 1966)
An honest effort to grapple with the harsh complexities of India, and a sympathetic account of people struggling to cope with, and some to overcome, cultural difference. The characters of the British Raj are drawn with sensitivity and compassion, and the story is utterly gripping. A variety of narrative voices give the novel extraordinary range […]
David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House, 2010)
Interweaving the history of the Dutch East India Company, Japan of the Shoguns and the mysteries of a Buddhist monastery, Mitchell tells a moving story of unrequited love. The upright and humourless clerk, Jacob de Zoet, is drawn into intrigue and corruption, and strives to find a way to escape while helping a fascinating women […]