SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN by Donna Leon

When the police break into the home of a local pediatrician and remove his adopted son, he finds himself defending his family in the only way that makes sense to him: breaking the nose of one of the officers. As Inspector Brunnetti begins to peel back the layers of this bizarre case he finds himself questioning his own morality.

Yet another gripping read delivered by Donna Leon, who has developed one of the most believable detectives in English language fiction.

THE KILLING CIRCLE by Andrew Pyper (from the uncorrected proof)

Patrick Rush is a widower raising his young son Sam. He has been demoted as an entertainment critic for the National Star to a t.v. reviewer, forced to write pandering commentary about reality television which he scorns. He decides to join a writer's group to force his hand at fiction, but at the Kensington Circle, Patrick gets more than he ever expected.

This is Pyper's fourth novel and it is as gripping as his first three (LOST GIRLS, THE TRADE MISSION and THE WILDFIRE SEASON). The narrative is like Russian dolls, story nesting in story, and its clever, albeit contrived, structure never disappoints as it moves to its redemptive conclusion.

The psychological terror was so convincingly palpable that I found myself yearning for the light of day.

THE KILLING CIRCLE will be published by Doubleday Canada in August 2008.

DOCTORED EVIDENCE by Donna Leon

A truculent octogenarian widow has her head bashed in and her housekeeper is accused and quickly pursued by the police who terrify her so convincingly that she throws herself in front of a train, never able to defend herself against the accusations.

Inspector Brunetti is put on the case after a neighbour comes forward to defend the housekeeper. What is revealed is a nefarious path to blackmail that involves the widow's only son and implicates officials in the Board of Education.

OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Petterson (2007)

Retired Oslo Native Trond moves to splendid isolation in rural Norway with his adopted dog after following the deaths of his wife and his sister. There he contemplates a tragedy in his past that reforms itself in a reconnection with his friend's younger brother, now a middle-aged man himself who happens to be a neighbour.

Petterson collapses present and past seamlessly in this haunting and eloquent story of forgiveness and redemption that won the 2007 Dublin IMPAC literary award.

THE OUTCAST by Sadie Jones (2008)

In this first novel set in rural England in 1947 and 1957, Jones primes the pump with secrets and rumours among the upper class. Lewis Aldridge returns home at nineteen after serving two years in jail for burning down the local church where his family worshipped a few years after the accidental death of his mother Elizabeth--one that he witnessed helplessly at the age of 10. His return to his father and his stepmother's home leads to new trouble in the two weeks before he reports for service in the British Armed Forces.

Kit Carmichael, a few years younger than Lewis, watches from afar as the local community makes it very difficult for its prodigal son to start over. The younger daughter of a prominent businessman revered by the townsfolk has her own secrets to protect.

I couldn't put this book down and can't believe that it's a first novel. Jones's narrative voice is the true thing.

TWENTY CHICKENS FOR A SADDLE by Robyn Scott (2008)

When she was six, Robyn Scott moved with her family from New Zealand to Botswana and met her grandparents for the first time. When Robyn's parents Kevin (a flying MD) and Lin (an Oxford-educated rebel) decide to transport their three small children to live in what was once a cowshed in a tiny village, everyone is excited about the possibility of the adventure.

The children adapt easily to being home-schooled and to the new flora and fauna, including snakes and scorpions. In a memorable scene, their grandfather dribbles grape juice out of both corners of his mouth for giant moths to drink as they perch on the ends of his moustache.

Scott is only 28 and she writes with grace and conviction and pure delight in the daily routines of her remarkable childhood.

ACQUA ALTA by Donna Leon

Commissario Brunetti is one of those detectives you wish you could find around your dinner table. He is kind, smart, well-read, thoughtful and determined to see the increasingly elusive justice served in his hometown.

As Venetians prepare for the awful winter flooding of the acqua alta by donning high rubber boots and sloshing through the cobbled streets, Brunetti finds out that his friend Brett, l'Americana, who is an expert in early Chinese pottery and ceramics, has been horribly beaten by Sicilian strangers in the comfort of her exclusive palazzo while her girlfriend, the reigning diva, Flavia Petrelli, is singing along to one of her own recordings at full blast in an adjacent room.

As the waters rise, Brunetti discovers the corpse of the director of the Doge's museum--the very man Brett Lynch was disuaded from contacting by her attackers. Will she be next?

Leon balances the tension and the horror of Brunetti's work life with the loving stability of his home life with his professor wife Paola and their adolescent children Chiara and Raffi.

THE SECRET LIVES OF PIPPA LEE by Rebecca Miller (2008)

Pippa Lee--a fifty-something third wife to the publishing lion Herb-- moves with her 80-year old husband into a retirement community after liquidating the trappings of their Manhattan life before Herb finds himself further and further along the path to decrepitude. Pippa is a doting wife, supporting her artist husband, who expects it. Their grown children, Grace (a photographer) and Ben (a soon-to-be-called-to-the-bar lawyer), are interesting and interested.

I enjoyed the witty repartee of the present in the novel, but found the flashbacks to Pippa's past where she worked as a model for an S&M lesbian filmmaker trying a little too hard to be hip.

The novel is currently in development as a film starring Alan Arkin, Julianne Moore and Winona Ryder, directed by Rebecca Miller. I am curious enough about the adaptation to go and see the movie when it's released.

PATRIMONY by Philip Roth

A friend of mine loaned me this memoir because both of us are working on manuscripts that include people learning to live with inoperable brain tumours.

Roth deals with his own father's diagnosis at 86 with directness and compassion and a certain wariness when surgeons are keen to put him under the knife to carve out bits and pieces of the brain tumour that has affected his hearing and his facial muscles: he looks as though he's either suffering from Bell's palsy or has had a stroke, and finds it next-to-impossible to eat and drink without dribbling the contents all over himself.

His father, ever the enthusiast in other people's lives, wants to have his writerly son help one of the retirees from the Jewish Y get his manuscript published. In an hilarious scene over a meal in the elder Roth's modest apartment, the friend, a Holocaust survivor, hands over the draft to Roth-the-younger's chagrin, especially when he realizes that the old man has written a pornographic memoir that he's having his own daughter edit to improve the English translation.

Philip Roth's appreciation for life is heightened all the more when he finds himself in surgery for an unexpected quintuple bypass about which he lies to his father not to add to his worry, a decision that upsets both of them.

Roth looks past all comfort and condolence to mine the truth about himself and about his father and about death and our fear of it. This is an extraordinary book, strengthened by the power of Roth's narrative genuis.

DEATH AT LA FENICE by Donna Leon

Chief Inspector Guido Brunnetti is assigned the case of an apparently murdered maestro, who was poisoned in his dressing room, it would seem, during the intermission at La Traviata he conducted in Venice's renowned La Fenice opera house.

As Brunnetti tries to create a profile of the victim, he learns that he was openly homophobic, to the point of preventing talented singers from receiving roles to meddling in their personal lives. The inspector digs into the Maestro's past and peels back rumours about his Nazi affiliation and previous affairs that ended badly.

Leon doesn't flinch from tough questions, nor does she candycoat human behaviour, especially when it's reprehensible.

THE TRANSLATOR: A TRIBESMAN'S MEMOIR OF DARFUR by Daoud Hari (2008)

My friend Ben invited me to meet author Daoud Hari at a little event last week as he was passing through Toronto to promote this extraordinary book. He is shy, soft-spoken and sweet-natured--all the more remarkable when you read about his life in Darfur.

The book opens with the African proverb: "If God must break your leg He will at least teach you to limp." Hari's resilience throughout his harrowing journey is astonishing and he unfolds his tale in a matter-of-fact, direct and distinctly unpitying way. Take for example his reflection about not being killed (something that happens repeatedly): "To not get killed is a very good thing. It makes you smile again and again, foolishly, helplessly for several hours," or his understanding of camels: "A camel, by the way can be away from its human family or camel family for twenty years and still know them very well when somehow it comes back. Camels are completely loyal and full of love and courage."

Or what about his comment: "It says everything about this land to know that even the mountains are not to be trusted, and that the crunching sound under your camel's hooves is usually human bones, hidden and revealed as the wind pleases."

That this man is still hopeful about humanity is what is most moving when you consider his experience in burying his brother Ahmed after an attack on their village where Ahmed stayed behind to defend with other young men, similarly slaughtered: " I found Ahmed. The effects of large caliber weapons and perhaps an RPG round were such that I barely recognized his body. I dug a grave as we do, so that he would rest on his right side with his face to the east. I put the pieces of this great fellow in the deep sand forever."

FRIEND OF THE DEVIL by Peter Robinson (2007)

I've been a fan of Robinson's Detective Banks since I picked up GALLOW'S VIEW, one of his earliest novels, probably 15 years ago. In FRIEND OF THE DEVIL, there are two murders of young women--both grisly. The first, a 30-something quadruplegic, has had her throat slit and left to bleed to death slumped in her wheelchair on the beach, and the second, a university student is raped, gagged and strangled moments after she parts from her drunk friends after a night out on the tiles.

Robinson complicates the first case by revealing that the victim was a serial killer herself, in a case that seems all too eerily akin to Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, especially when you remember that Homolka was known for "making a deal with the devil" in her efforts for leniency in her sentence while her husband received life in prison for the murders of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, two of the high school girls they tortured and murdered. While Banks and Annie Cabbot are investigating the separate cases, a third is murdered, but this time it's an officer, and more specifically a member of their own team who was apparently lurking in his off hours to try to catch the repeat offender.

FRIEND OF THE DEVIL moves to a thrilling conclusion. If you haven't read Robinson before, this would be a good place to start.

THE GUARDIAN by Nicholas Sparks

Sparks is the same guy who wrote THE NOTEBOOK that was adapted for the screen and made into the heart-rending captial R-romantic vehicle starring Ryan Reynolds and Rachel McAdams--not to mention James Garner. THE GUARDIAN is another novel about love lost and found.

What interested me about this book, in addition to having an almost human Great Dane, was the way that Sparks torqued the typical romance into a thriller that had me flipping pages to be sure the sociopath received his comeuppance at the end.

If you're looking for a quick, undemanding, yet entertaining read, this book should leap to the top of your list.

PARIS: VARIOUS TITLES including PARIS TO THE MOON; THE FLANEUR; PARIS, FRANCE: PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS and A MOVEABLE FEAST

I spent the March Break in Paris and found myself reaching for books about that fair city from the bookshelves at Shakespeare and Company, in the Latin Quarter, facing the Seine.


PARIS TO THE MOON (2005) is New Yorker writer Adam Gopnick's personal essays about living with his wife Martha and their young son Luke in Paris in the 1990s. They are eclectic and charming, both the essays and the people and you learn quickly what matters to a five-year-old--evidently swimming at the Ritz where there are mermaid mosaics he can dive down and kiss is one thing.



THE FLANEUR: A STROLL THROUGH THE PARADOXES OF PARIS (2001) by Edmund White has a distinctly gay perspective of life in Paris in the 70s and 80s. I learned invaluable expressions like "poules de luxe" (high class hookers) and "le non dit" (the great unsaid) from White as well as an appreciation for flirting and how it is an essential part of everyone's day, gay or straight. White is a gossipper and I learned that Collette apparently asked her dentist to replace all of her teeth with jade, and that Josephine Baker claimed "the rear end exists. I see no reason to be ashamed of it. It's true there are some rear ends that are so stupid, so pretentious, so insignificant that they're good only for sitting on." I didn't know that Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes worked as a dishwasher in Montmartre where he wrote a poem about Baker and sold it to VANITY FAIR.

PARIS, FRANCE, Gertrude Stein's personal recollections about her life at the centre of an exclusive coterie of artists in the 1920s was the most difficult of these books to read because her style is choppy and affected. An amusing anecdote involves Picasso who encouraged her to purchase a completely different dog from her black standard poodle who died because he claimed it wouldn't be fair to the new dog. Her French friends had another opinion along the lines of "le roi est mort; vive le roi." She followed the French and bought another poodle and gave him exactly the same name.

Hemingway's memoir A MOVEABLE FEAST which records episodes from 1921-1926 was published posthumously in the 60s. It is an interesting balance to Stein's book since it involves the same characters including Fitzgerald and Joyce at the same time. Hemingway's prose is terse and strong and clean. I discovered that he and Fitzgerald and Pound curried funds together from their wealthy friends to raise enough money to spring Thomas Eliot from his life of drudgery in the bank in London--the great TS Eliot who became the modern poet to define a generation with "The Waste Land" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" What impressed me most about Hemingway was his self discipline. He "always worked until [he] had something done and [he] always stopped when [he] knew what was going to happen next."

CONSOLATION by Michael Redhill (2007)

I picked up a copy at the airport on my way to France and found myself immersed in the two Toronto worlds created so convincingly by Redhill, whose previous novel MARTIN SLOAN I admired. I was intrigued by the opening epigraph borrowed from Borges that "the man who commits suicide remains in the world of dreams"--a generous and romantic notion, perhaps a comfort to families who are the survivors of suicide.

In one storyline, Jem Hallam is an apothecary from the UK come to set up a business in 1856 Toronto with the notion of bringing his young family across when he's established. Circumstances find him befriending an unusual photographer and one of his models. The three of them become family to each other in the absence of their relatives.

In the contemporary narrative set in 1996, David Hallis has recently completed suicide, unable to continue to live his increasingly dependent and dwindling life due to Lou Gehrig's disease. While he is yet able to walk, albeit unsteadily, he arranges with his daughter's boyfriend to be dropped off at the Toronto Island Ferry at the foot of Yonge Street--his journey across the Styx where he leaps to his death in Lake Ontario.

Redhill adeptly shifts from one narrative to the next moving between Toronto's past and present evoking love, memory and grief all the while.

CONSOLATION won this year's City of Toronto Book Award.

SHORTCOMINGS by Adrian Tomine

I'm only beginning to read graphic novels (like PERSEPOLIS and MAUS), but I picked up SHORTCOMINGS while I was at the Beaches library branch and sat down to browse and ended up reading it from cover to cover in about an hour.

The simple black and white drawings are striking and Tomine's ability to develop character in such a limited space is impressive. If all graphic novels are as smart and insightful as this one, I could get hooked.

REMEMBERING THE BONES by Frances Itani (2007)

Georgie Witley is invited to share her 80th birthday with 98 others in the commonwealth also born on April 21, 1926--HM Queen Elizabeth II's birthday. She is driving herself to the airport when her car careens off the road and tumbles into a ravine. There, tossed onto the sloping woods, Georgie considers the arc of her life, which in its contemplation leads her to think about her role as mother, wife, widow, daughter.

REMEMBERING THE BONES is an extraordinary tale about an ordinary woman. I was suprised by its narrative drive.

RUN by Ann Patchett (2007) HarperCollins

After an evening of hearing Jesse Jackson speak at Harvard, former Boston Mayor Doyle and his two adopted sons Tip and Teddy find themselves stuck in a snowstorm unable to find a cab. Tip is a dreamer and is distracted with thoughts of cataloguing fish back in his lab when he is hit by an SUV, but not before he is pushed out of the way from being run over by a stranger, also making her way home with her 11 year old daughter.

The 24 hours that follow are harrowing for the family as new bonds are formed with the young black girl, Kenya, and her mother Tennessee, who is hospitalized and awaiting surgery for her internal life-threatening injuries. Kenya has known about Tip and Teddy and has followed their public lives in a way that is marginally creepy.

Patchett weaves the voices together with grace and beauty and explores the differences in opportunity available to those who are rich/poor, black/white in contemporary Boston. In the Harvard residence there's a sign promoting Obama 2012, a curious and forward thinking pop-cultural marker.

ASHES TO BONES by Kathy Reichs

Forensic pathologist Temperance Brennan's new cases involve the decomposing remains of several adolescent girls. One of them presents clues that remind her of an Acadian girl from her childhood who had for all intents and purposes disappeared.

She met Evangeline and her little sister Obeline while they were staying with their aunt and uncle during the summers in South Carolina. Tempe and Evangeline bonded through storytelling, poetry and their joint obsession with Anne of Green Gables.

Typically fast-paced, with more forensic detail than usual, ASHES TO BONES is a gripping crime novel that is also educational. If you have a squeamish stomach, you might want to give this book a pass.

A FOOL IN PARADISE by Doris McCarthy

Painter Doris McCarthy's memoir of her childhood and early professional years is enchanting. I knew she'd been educated at OCAD by Lismer, one of the Group of Seven painters, but I had no idea that she taught in a vibrant art programme throughout the war years at Central Tech, in the heart of Toronto.

McCarthy's voice is intimate and honest. She continues to paint well into her 99th year.