Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel (HarperCollins, 1994)
I recently discovered this Spanish writer of devilishly clever literary mysteries. The characters are well-drawn, and the mystery revolves around a Flemish painting and the intricacies of chess. Wonderfully paced, and urgently compelling, this is a great read on a long plane ride, or at the cabin.
Gao Xingjiang, Soul Mountain (Harper Perennial, 2004)
Gao was the first Chinese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, although he did so from exile in France. After the publication of a work dealing in part with the massacre at Tiananmen Square, all his writings were banned in China. In awarding him the Nobel, the Committee referred to his “œuvre of […]
Iris Murdoch, The Bell (Vintage, 1999; first published in 1973)
I first began to read Murdoch when I was studying in England in the 1980s and was drawn to her complex characters; no-one is ever good or bad, everyone is an amalgam. The Bell is no exception, for here we have a religious community of deeply confused people struggling to find a way to live […]
Tim Winton, Dirt Music ( Scribner, 2001)
I discovered this book browsing in a New York bookstore. Winton is a youngish Australian whose novels have twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. Dirt Music is the story of a couple of outcasts who find each other, lose each other, and against pretty remarkable odds, connect again. I have rarely read any […]
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (Vintage Canada, 2007)
Mitchell is probably best known for Cloud Atlas, now, as they say, “a major motion picture.” I thought that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) was fabulous. Mitchell’s diversity of subject matter and style is remarkable. In Black Swan Green he writes in the voice of thirteen-year-old Jason Tyler, who lives in a […]
Nadine Gordimer, A Guest of Honour (Penguin, 1973)
Gordimer’s writing is simply brilliant, but her stories always leave me with a profound sense of sadness. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1991, Gordimer is closely associated with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. But she is no naïve optimist! A Guest of Honour is the story of a colonial-era British civil servant, Colonel […]
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan (Penguin Canada, 2009)
Part of a series on “extraordinary Canadians,” I was drawn to this brief biography because it coincided with the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth, and because I thought it a stroke of genius to ask Coupland to write on McLuhan. The result is a fresh, insightful and at times psychedelic exploration of the McLuhan era. […]
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 […]