ON BEAUTY by Zadie Smith (2005)

England's wunderkind novelist who broke on the scene with the satiric WHITE TEETH, has established herself with this third novel about a blended family living in small town New England. Dad is a progressive professor who made the predictable middle-aged man's mistake and had an affair with a colleague. Mom is a luscious African American whose kindness keeps her weary family together. The three siblings position themselves for approval from a variety of sources. What Smith does most convincingly is write dialogue. Zora and Levi and Kiki leap off the page.

ON BEAUTY won the Orange Prize for fiction. The title is stolen from a poem by Smith's equally ambitious literary spouse, Nick Laird.

THREE WISHES by Deborah Ellis (2005)

Banned by the Toronto Board of Education, this collection of personal essays from the point of view of both Israeli and Palestinian children and teens tries to account for the prejudice into which they are born. In their own words, these vignettes are equally despairing and hopeful about the burden of growing up in the Middle East today.

THE MASTER (2005) by Colm Toibin

Toibin inhabits the psyche of American man of letters Henry James in this triumph of imagination and style that takes place over the course of five years in James's life in England, when he found himself writing for the stage at the same time as the celebrated and immensely popular Oscar Wilde.

THE MASTER recently won the 2006 Dublin IMPAC Literary Award, the richest prize for English language fiction.

THE PETTY DETAILS OF SO AND SO'S LIFE (2002) by Camilla Gibb

This novel explores the life of quirky siblings Emma and Blue who embark on separate journeys of self-discovery due to their mostly inept parents. Emma becomes obsessed with archaeology and digging up the past and Blue finds his own way through his work as a tatoo artist with the support of his girlfriend, a former stripper.

Camilla Gibb won the Trillium Book Award this Spring for her most recent novel SWEETNESS IN THE BELLY.

THE MEMORY BOOK (2005) by Howard Engel

Private Investigator Benny Cooperman is recovering in a Toronto hospital from a serious blow to the head. He has a peculiar condition that allows him to write, but not to read. And, while he can remember great swaths of his distant past, he finds himself sometimes brushing his teeth with his shaving cream. Friends in homicide tell Benny that he was found in a dumpster on the U of T campus beside a dead woman. Probably left for dead himself.

Engel's book gives an insider's perspective on what it feels like to be utterly frustrated by a head injury.

There is a captivating afterword by Dr. Oliver Sacks, who does his best to explain Engel's condition alexia sine agraphia and its ramifications.

THE DELICATE STORM (2003) by Giles Blunt

Already a fan of Detective John Cardinal from Blunt's other crime novels, it was a quick decision to pick up this one. Blunt's characters are believable and cunning and full of human frailty. I especially enjoyed the mini-history lesson refresher about the 1970 FLQ Crisis which is the thread that connects the contemporary murders Cardinal is compelled to solve.

PRAIRIE HARDBALL (1997) by Alison Gordon

Baseball writer Kate Henry takes a holiday at home in small town Saskatchewan and brings along her partner, Detective Andy Munro. They join her parents for her mother's induction in the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame since she played in the 1940s (while all of the boys were at war) on the legendary Racine Belles.

While at the reunion in North Battleford, one of the Belles is murdered.

PRAIRIE HARDBALL is part nostalgia for the glory days of the game, part road trip and all intrigue. It has me reaching for the rest of Alison Gordon's Kate Henry Mysteries.

THE BOOKFAIR MURDERS (1997) by Anna Porter

World-class editor Marsha Hillier is networking her way through a posh party at the Frankfurt Bookfair when she stops to chat with Andrew Myles, a top literary agent who represents the darling of the event, Margaret Drury Carter who has recently signed a three-book deal for $20 million--a sum worthy of Stephen King and Tom Clancy. As the narrator quips, "Andrew was dead, so he didn't respond."

In addition to being populated with real people from the publishing world, THE BOOKFAIR MURDERS is an intriguing mystery with many suspects.

THE MURDER ROOM by P.D. James

At a small family run museum outside of London, a grisly murder is committed, one that appears to be a copycat. When Dr. Neville is burned to death in his vintage Jag, his brother and sister co-operate with the police to try to figure out who could possibly wish their psychologist brother any harm. With a dash of romance on the side between the poet-cum-detective and a literature professor at Cambridge, this mystery is a satisfying romp.

RACE AGAINST TIME by Stephen Lewis (2005)

Delivered as the Massey lectures this past fall, Stephen Lewis contemplates the fate of Africa as the first world stands idly by. The opening lecture, "It Shames and Diminishes Us All," will convince you that 0.7 is potentially the most powerful number. Period. If the G8 countries actually delivered on their promise of 0.7 of the GDP, and forgave existing debts in sub-Saharan Africa, then those devastatingly poor countries might have a chance to rebuild.

Lewis's honesty and integrity and passion about the dire circumstances of women and children suffering the HIV/AIDS pandemic will make you want to raise a call to arms.

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA by Philip Roth

Prolific novelist Philip Roth blurs fact and fiction in this remarkable novel which supposes what might have happened had Anti-Semitic, world-famous aviator Charles Lindberg been elected President of the USA, sending FDR to defeat in the years surrounding WWII. The narrator is eight-year-old Philip who grows up in New York City, proud of his Jewish cultural heritage and then conflicted when his older brother Sandy appears to support the charismatic new leader. This novel is brave and terrifying in equal measure.

BABES IN THE WOODS by Ruth Rendell (2003)

Two teenaged children and their adult minder go missing during a storm while their parents are away for an extended weekend in Paris. Their mother believes they've drowned in the floodwater and when a t-shirt that unmistakably belongs to her daughter is found by the police, she is convinced of foul play. The detective on the case has his awareness heightened by the fact that his adult daughter is trying to extricate herself from an abusive relationship.

When the police learn that the son belonged to a fundamentalist Christian sect, everyone seems suspicious. Even the children's famous photographer grandmother.

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE by Wally Lamb (1998)

Keith Cressy told me this book resonated with him more than any other that he's read so far. It's a whopper of a novel clocking in at more than 800 pages, but every page is worth your time. Really.

Thomas and Dominick Birdsey are identical twins who are raised in an abusive environment. Like all families theirs is rife with secrets. After their first year at university, Thomas experiences his first psychotic episode and after several misdiagnoses is properly diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE will tear at your heart in so many ways as you get to know quite intimately the emotional burdens of each of the characters. It is not an easy read, but it is well worth your effort. I'm adding it to my personal pantheon of favourite books.

MORTAL CAUSES by Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin is a mystery writer at the top of his game. In MORTAL CAUSES, Inspector John Rebus is seconded to a special unit to investigate a ghastly execution that happened in Mary King's Close in Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival. Those of you who know the streets of Edinburgh will find the geography compellingly familiar as well as creepy.

It turns out that the first victim is the son of a gangster who is doing time and, of course, is stoked by revenge once he hears of his only son's gruesome death. As in Renaissance revenge tragedy, the bodies pile up before the good guys figure out whodunnit.

NOTHING LOST by John Gregory Dunne (2004)

Dunne's final novel (he died unexpectedly in December 2003) shows his fascination with "the forgotten, the rejected and the left behind." When a lurid murder comes to trial in small town America, there is a media circus as the celebrity machine comes to feast on the events.

There is a cast of memorable and credible characters including a defense attorney whose real father was a Las Vegas mobster, a tough gay former state's attorney, a sociopathic supermodel and sister of the accused, and a glamorous right wing congresswoman who is a gubernatorial candidate.

No one escapes Dunne's unsentimental narrative.

DEMOCRACY by Joan Didion (1984)

Inez Christian Victor is the wife of a U.S. senator who has designs on the presidency. Set in the years following the fall of Saigon, DEMOCRACY is a political satire as well as bildungsroman. Inez is spunky, intelligent and self aware. The politics of that time are inseparable from private life and join to assure both public and private disaster.

Didion's eye for social commentary is precise.

THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE by Gloria Naylor

A collection of linked stories that weave together to form a novel, THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE honours the lives of several tough Black American women who inhabit the margins of society because they are either on welfare, are prostitutes or are lesbians. When it was first published in 1980 one critic wrote that "vibrating with undisguised emotion" the book " springs from the same roots that produced the blues...it sings of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America."

LARRY'S PARTY by Carol Shields

Larry Weller is a florist who lives in Winnipeg with his wife Dorrie and his young son Ryan. He builds topiary mazes after "getting the bug" during his honeymoon visit to Hampton Court Palace. As he learns more about designing these labyrinths he also negotiates his way more adeptly through his relationships with his son and with the women in his life. Shields, as usual, shows herself to be the master of communicating what is remarkable about an ordinary life.

FORTY WORDS FOR SORROW by Giles Blunt

Detective John Cardinal faces his own criminal past again when his partner Detective Lise Delorme is assigned to determine the source of Cardinal's income that enables him to pay for his daughter's graduate education at Yale. Delorme and Cardinal are put on murder cases of children as yet unsolved. Once they discover the remains of a thirteen year old Native girl in an abandoned mineshaft on Windigo Island, a killer strikes again. Set in Algonquin Bay (fictionalized North Bay, Ontario) and in the Toronto forensics lab, FORTY WORDS FOR SORROW is fast-paced and, at times, terrifying. It makes you really wonder about youth in care.

THE TORTURE OF OTHERS by Val McDermid

Detective Carol Jordan is wooed back on to the front lines of police work by a series of cold cases including missing children. Recent murders of prostitutes are especially difficult for Jordan to face since she is recovering from being raped when she went undercover in Berlin. The narrative twists and turns with the snap of the sexual predator's fingers. It is compelling and sickening to read.