EMILY, ALONE by Stewart O'Nan (2011) Viking Penguin, 255 pages

Even before I began the story proper, O'Nan's sweet nostalgic dedication, "For my mother, who took me to the bookmobile" and the Virginia Woolf epigraph: "Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life-- startling, unexpected, unknown?" drew me in.

EMILY, ALONE explores the ordinary day-to-day intimacies of widow Emily Maxwell, now well into her seventies, whose remaining companions are her sister-in-law Arlene and her aging Springer Spaniel Rufus.

Under O'Nan's storytelling spell, each sentence seems like a prayer about aging and memory at once familiar and slightly foreign: "Often she searched for words, trailing off in midsentence, then waving away the incomplete thought, one hand flapping." Remembering formal occasions "trying to pinch open the clasp and marry it to the tiny eyelet" of her necklace, Emily is nostalgic about Henry, her dead husband, who when alive "would stand behind her like a valet...She'd find him admiring her in the mirror and while she discounted his adoration of her beauty--based as it was, on a much younger woman--she also relied on it, and as time past she was grateful for the restorative powers of his memory." Isn't that restorative power of memory what we all yearn for as we age, often messily, inconveniently, ungraciously?

Emily waxes philosophical too, especially during the bleak midwinter, resigning herself to the notion that the past is another country and admitting the paradox that "Time, which had her on the rack, would just as effortlessly rescue her. This funk was temporary. Tomorrow she would be fine."

I suppose the great appeal of this novel is that everyone can relate. Each one of us has an Emily in our lives, an aging mother, or sister or great aunt or grandmother who is determined to be independent and not a bother or a burden to daughters or sons, and determined to "wait through everything else to do the thing you wanted." In Emily's case that means "Easter, her garden, Chautauqua." Though, "she thought there should be more to live for."

As soon as she's able to get out and putter in her garden, Emily feels the relief of time lifting from her: "She and the bees and the worms--even the spiders--all had their jobs to do. Left to her work, she forgot everything but the task at hand, falling into reverie." Even now I know how that feels, to be completely absorbed and to be outside of time, totally immersed in place. For weeks Emily avoids visiting her husband's grave and "finally it was only by writing his name down on the calendar as if they had a date that she made herself go."

EMILY, ALONE is a beautiful beautiful book. Make time for it and O'Nan's spell in your busy life. You'll be glad you did.

TEN THOUSAND SAINTS by Eleanor Henderson from the ARC (forthcoming June 2011 from Ecco) 383 pages

Remember how Jennifer Egan's A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD set book lovers abuzz in 2010? Well, get ready for Eleanor Henderson's TEN THOUSAND SAINTS to shake you up and leave you breathless in 2011.

It's the end of 1987 and full-time friends, frequent stoners and all-time slackers Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn are celebrating Jude's 16th birthday beneath the stadium seats of the football field in small-town Vermont, sharing "the dregs of last night's bowl" that they had stolen from the glove box of Teddy's mom's car. Although they only have $140 saved between them, the boys hope to "save some more money and when they were both old enough to drop out (Teddy would be sixteen in May), they were going to buy bus tickets to the Port Authority and stay with Johnny [Teddy's eighteen-year-old half brother] until they could find a place of their own."

Enter Eliza, the daughter of Jude's absentee father Les's Upper Westside girlfriend Diane. Eliza is on her way back to Manhattan from a holiday ski-cation with friends and she stops in Vermont ostensibly to meet Jude and his sister Prudence face to face. A party girl herself, Eliza not only gets Teddy high on cocaine, but also encourages him to have sex with her. And, it's the consequences of that decision that turn everybody's world upside down in a cascade of "what ifs" and drive the plot forward for the next three hundred pages.

Teddy's fatal overdose is not a secret-- you know from the opening page of his death--however, what happens as a result leads to the heart of the novel where there are secrets kept and told by all of the main players, secrets about paternity, true love, AIDS and abortion. Yet, being young, they continue to dream. Eliza imagines "Annabel Lee" growing inside her, Jude believes he can really form a good punk band that will get gigs, Johnny's determined to remain "straight edge" and do the right thing to honour his brother's memory, and Rooster hopes that he will live to see another day with his true love by his side.

There is not a misplaced thought or gesture in TEN THOUSAND SAINTS. With impeccable pacing and enviable prose, Eleanor Henderson has written a lasting portrait of two generations struggling to understand each other in the modern age. I believed every word.

RAVEN STOLE THE MOON by Garth Stein (1998) HarperCollins, 441 pages

I came to Garth Stein through his most recent novel THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN, featuring Enzo, a canine protagonist with an obsession for race car driving and the uncanny ability to scent cancer. How I loved that book and wished that what transpires in it could possibly be true.

His earlier novel RAVEN STOLE THE MOON proves to me that Stein is not a one hit wonder. He's got storytelling legs. And, like literary thriller wunderkind Kate Atkinson, each book is different from the last, yet equally accomplished and satisfying.

On the anniversary of her young son's death, Jenna Rosen abandons her materially comfortable Seattle life by skipping out on a networking party she'd been barely tolerating with her ambitious husband Robert. She's tired of his tired jokes and decides on a whim to get in his car and drive until she can clear her head. That drive takes her to the ferry docks where she offers to buy a young couple a ticket to Skagway because they've lost one of theirs. Through this kindness of strangers gesture, Jenna finds herself also drawn to a northern journey back to Wrangell where her son Bobby disappeared two years previous. And, the young couple offer her a gift of a handmade necklace featuring an Indian spirit called a kushtaka. Jenna is both touched by their gift and intrigued by its enigmatic symbolism.

A mother's grief is fierce. Once Jenna returns to the site of her only child's death, she is determined to find a way to assuage his restless spirit. With the help of local strangers in the Alaskan wilderness, Jenna tries to sift through the terrifying beliefs of her ancestors, the Tlingit. What she must face is bone-chilling and Stein will have you believing that each heart-thumping turn is the genuine article. By mixing Jenna's emotions with her Native cultural inheritance, Stein challenges the power of grief to set things right.

RAVEN STOLE THE MOON is an engrossing tale about loss and redemption and the work essential to turn grief into something more lustrous.

BOSSYPANTS by Tina Fey (2011) Little, Brown and Company, 275 pages

Tina Fey's BOSSYPANTS is a collection of personal essays (some familiar if you read The New Yorker), lists, anecdotes, work advice as well as 30 ROCK and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE script excerpts that will make you feel as if she were sitting in your living room blithely recounting the unexpected and remarkable trajectory of her life.

The cover artwork will either amuse you or creep you out. With perfect makeup and sporting a flattering haircut (both of which she defies in most of the other photos included in the book), Fey's head is photoshopped onto the torso of a middle-aged man. It would truly make me happy if those arms turned out to be Alec Baldwin's--Fey's inspiration for 30 ROCK's antithetical Baldwin: Jack Donaghy.

Tina Fey is at the top of her game. She was the youngest person to be given the Mark Twain award for Humour, has an armful of Emmys for 30 ROCK which she produces, co-writes and co-stars in on NBC, has been on the big screen with her pal Amy Poehler in BABY MAMA and Steve Carrell in DATE NIGHT, and written for the big screen (MEAN GIRLS) and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE to which she returned to play Sarah Palin opposite Poehler's Hillary Clinton. What is obvious about all of these successes is that Fey takes none of them for granted.

Although I'm a bit older than Fey, I do share with her the horror of the YOU ARE A YOUNG LADY NOW pamphlet, secreted in my underwear drawer when I was ten and other mortifying coming-of-age milestones like publicly trying on a bra outside of my clothes in a department store. While I didn't work as YMCA receptionist as my first grown up job post-college, I did work as a temp for a social services agency in Toronto, where it was common place to witness tattooed street youth convulsing in heroin withdrawal while I answered the phones and set up appointments for them with their social workers.

At the end of the parody list "Remembrances of Being a Little Bit Fat," I could kiss Fey for writing, "We should leave people alone about their weight. Being chubby for a while (provided you don't give yourself diabetes) is a natural phase of life and nothing to be ashamed of. Like puberty or slowly turning into a Republican." Also, about surviving in the workplace, she sagely intones, "don't waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions...Do your thing and don't care if they like it."

By the end of BOSSYPANTS I was happy to know that Jack Burditt wrote the line from the episode "Rosemary's Baby" starring Carrie Fisher (herself surely a smartypants script doctor as well as the iconic Princess Leia) as a crazy former-era comedy writer about whom Donaghy snarks, "Never go with a hippy to a second location." Most of all, however, I would like to meet Don Fey, her dad, the man to whom powerful men like Lorne Michaels and Alec Baldwin "stand down." After meeting him Fey admits, "it rearranges something in their brain about me...What are they realizing? I wonder. That they'd better never mess with me, or Don Fey will yell at them? That I have high expectations for the men in my life because I have a strong father figure?" Right on both accounts, I hope.

The best advice before reading BOSSYPANTS: have a prophylactic pee. You'll need to read this romp on an empty bladder. Or else.

MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU by Louisa Young (from the ARC, forthcoming May 2011) HarperCollins Canada, 325 pages

If you are already a fan of Pat Barker's REGENERATION trilogy and her novel LIFE CLASS about the confluence of visual art and emerging reconstructive facial surgery as a result of injuries on the World War One front, then you will be completely predisposed to be entranced by Louisa Young's MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU.

In 1907 as a young boy in working class London Riley Purefoy happens to be insinuated into the lives of the posh Waveney family when patriarch Robert Waveney suggests he be a face model for a painting by Sir Alfred: "He wants to put it in a painting, on top of a goaty-legged faun. What do you think? Could you sit still long enough for him to paint you? He'd probably give you a shilling." There, under Sir Alfred's tutelage over the course of 7 years, Riley goes from brush cleaner and occasional model to becoming a painter himself, one his patron refers to as "a miniature Roger Fry." In the studio, Riley meets Nadine Waveney, the educated and beautiful daughter and dreamily falls in love, half-knowing that theirs was an untenable one because of class.

Nadine and Riley are 18 when the war breaks out and both are determined to make a genuine contribution. Riley enlists and is an ideal soldier, ready to be told what to do and to do it. Nadine also does not shy away from what is required of her as a volunteer nurse; she applies herself with equal measure to both the drudgery and the emotional aspect of the work, admitting, "When no one was looking she kissed the dying, their cheeks, their foreheads, their mouths...They whispered, 'I love you.' 'I love you too, darling,' she whispered back. Because in the face of death, really, who cares about love?"

While serving on the Front in France, Riley sustains a ghastly injury and is invalided home to England where he comes under the care of the progressive physician, Major Dr. Harold Gillies. Gillies is a pioneer of plastic surgery and specializes in facial reconstruction. (See his seminal 1920 text, "Plastic Surgery of the Face" for actual details.) At the heart of this novel Young shows how Gillies not only rebuilt faces, but also lives. When he is strong enough to contemplate writing a missive to his mother and to Nadine, Riley lies about the severity of his wound--it is that form letter that gives the book its title.

In truth, Riley admits (in an inspired extended analogy), "he looked like a scarlet crater, rimmed with a half-formed pile of earthworks, a fallen-over pile of dirty sandbags. Grey bruising and purple swelling and black scab, hanging loose over nothing. The metal chin support, like revetting. Seams between pads of flesh running across his face like trenches, swelling like sandbags. A few loose stitches like barbed wire. I look like fucking no man's land."

Because of his deformity, Riley decides to protect Nadine from what he now perceives to be an impossible love. Yes, he is a decorated soldier, but he is a decorated soldier without a face. He enlists his nurse Rose Locke's (cousin of Riley's Commanding Officer Peter) help to perpetuate the lie; she willingly obliges. And, because Nadine believes the lie, she asks for a transfer out of London to France where, "Everything was as wrong as she felt. She was glad. She took all the dirtiest jobs. She didn't complain. She didn't join in...Night and work were her blankets...Death had a happy ending every time. Peace. She liked their poor corpses, safe on their way to a numbered grave, cosy within the system built and created for them. Not lying out there, in the dark, alone."

After many surgeries, when Riley has the opportunity to meet Mrs. Ainsworth, his fellow soldier Jack's widow, that moment is transformational. Her kindness and lack of judgement sets Riley on the path of real healing.

MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU held me in its thrall, even during moments that I felt squeamish from the brilliant surgical detail. In the end, you will realize that all of the characters bravely faced wars of their own.

THE BIRD SISTERS by Rebecca Rasmussen (2011) Crown Publishing, 287 pages

Rebecca Rasmussen's debut novel (to be launched to the wider world on April 12th) will tug at your heartstrings. Guaranteed. The tenderness demonstrated by her characters had me weeping by page three when protagonist Twiss receives an injured goldfinch from a little girl after her mother's minivan "severed one of the goldfinch's wings and crushed the other one." Here is what started my tears:

"She'd offer the goldfinch a teaspoon of millet and peanut butter and hold him up to the window so he could see the sky. Once a bird lost his ability to fly, not much else could be done in the way of mending him. Losing a wing was a little like losing a leg and the freedom of movement, of spirit, it granted you; most people could live without the former but not the latter."

THE BIRD SISTERS is a fully formed narrative. From the beginning I thought of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and how the summer that Dill came to Maycomb County, everything changed in Jem and Scout's lives. Something akin happens here when Twiss and Milly's older cousin Bett comes to stay in the summer of 1947 and changes the course of all of their lives forever. Each of the characters you will meet seems like flesh and blood relatives from a less complicated, albeit occasionally harrowing, time.

The spinsters, now in their seventies and still living together in the home in which they were raised, carry talismans with them as comfort: worn advice from their mother who repeatedly told them, "Bone china is like your heart. If it breaks, it can't be fixed," and a copy of The Curious Book of Birds, inscribed, "For Milly, Because."

Rasmussen carefully balances the heartache with moments of levity that surprise and delight, often found in comments from each of the teenaged girls who are 14, 16 and 18 or through their candid observations about the limited small-town world in which they live. Fourteen-year-old Twiss asks her 16-year-old sister Milly, for instance, "How would you like to be stuck with someone like Adam?" And, instead of waiting for Milly's response, offers up her own: "I would have eaten that apple too. Just to get away from him."

When Henry the parrot suffers a bout of insomnia before his musical debut at the town fair where he sings "Ave Maria" in Latin, his human companion Mrs. Bettle tells the girls that he "says the most appalling things after a night of no sleep." Of course, I imagine Henry swearing a blue streak and needing to go to confession to be absolved of his instinctive naughtiness. The faithless Father Rice would certainly be amused. When a pushy parishioner demands, "What if I refuse to live in a godless world?," he counsels, "Then, I'm afraid you'll have to shoot yourself, my dear. Either God doesn't exist or He's too busy to do it Himself."

Like Carol Shields, Rasmussen manages to show what is extraordinary in the ordinary lives lived by ordinary folk. There are well-placed stones along the narrative path that gesture towards what is to come: a fortune teller's advice; an almost drowning; the heady promise of first love; the agony of betrayal; an unexpected proposal; forged letters; a ride in an airplane; bars of lavender soap shaped like seashells; a tractor-shaped buttercream cake; purple prairie happiness tonic; secrets kept and told; a book shaped like forgiveness. With each deft reveal, the story will have you in its luminous thrall.

And, there is wisdom woven through. Teenaged Twiss realizes, "Maybe it was easier to tell your life to someone you didn't know than to tell it to someone you did." At the same time, from her perch atop the Ferris wheel at the county fair, her older sister Milly sees "that everything below her...was too good to be true and, like the Ferris wheel, would eventually have to come down." Most importantly they both know, and this knowledge binds them just as much as their blood, that "You can't always explain why you love the people you love." You can't.

In "Anthem" Leonard Cohen wrote, "there is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Make room for the light in THE BIRD SISTERS. It will split you open and fill you up. It is a blindingly stunning debut.

THE HIGH ROAD by Edna O'Brien (1988) Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 214 pages

Edna O'Brien is considered by Alice Munro to be perhaps the finest short story writer anywhere. THE HIGH ROAD is a mid-career novel set in a Spanish enclave where there is a circle of women who yearn for loves past and present.

You'll meet Charlotte, a former debutante who has chosen a life of withdrawal; Iris, an imperious aging self-absorbed harpy; and Anna, the narrator, who senses in hotel maid Catalina her chance to defy social expectations of suitable relationships and renew hope for true love.

It seems to me that O'Brien was trying to push conventions of the day aside and establish herself as a writer who experiments with boundaries both stylistic and sexual. Reading the novel almost 25 years later, it feels decidedly dated.

SANCTUS by Simon Toyne (from the ARC forthcoming May 2011 UK, Sept 2011 Canada) HarperCollins, 474 pages

Are you a fan of smart literary thrillers? Think of Andrew Pyper's LOST GIRLS, THE WILDFIRE SEASON, THE KILLING CIRCLE and THE GUARDIANS or titles by Kate Atkinson including CASE HISTORIES and STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG. Well, Simon Toyne is a sparkling new voice in the genre. SANCTUS is his debut novel and has already sold to 40 countries, is due to be translated into 23 languages and the enthusiasm continues to build worldwide. It will be published by HarperCollins Canada in September 2011.

I am lucky enough to have been given an Advance Reading Copy. It arrived on a Friday and I shirked social commitments that night to read it in two sittings. Toyne's storytelling is seductive and addicting. You'll see.

Set primarily in contemporary Turkey on a mountaintop above a tourist destination, SANCTUS also travels to Rio de Janeiro and New York City to landscapes more familiar both physically and emotionally. The epigraph, "A man is a god in ruins," (Ralph Waldo Emerson) exquisitely gestures to the crux of the story. But, tempting though it is, I will not reveal that here.

What you may know, however, is that there is a secret society of monks who live a reclusive life in Ruin, Turkey where they protect their Sacrament with a ferocity and determination that borders on sociopathology. No one outside of their cloistered community knows exactly what the Sacrament is, though one brave soul, Brother Samuel, risks his life to show the world clues to the rebus preserved inside their Citadel. When his dangerous, symbolic act is witnessed not only by tourists milling about, but also through the transmission of that very act through hand-held devices and lurking media, the world soon knows about this extraordinary moment.

There are immediate rippling effects that only a few folks understand: development aid worker Kathryn Mann and a handful of her intimates dare to hope that a new beginning is at hand; New York City reporter Liv Adamsen wonders if perhaps what might be the reappearance of her long lost brother will help her to solve lifelong questions she's had about herself.

The chapters are short. The pace lightning-quick. I found myself putting off routines like preparing meals and walking the dog to keep reading.

Simon Toyne has penned a gripping, taut narrative that will have you questioning everything about the characters, about yourself, and about the true nature of faith. You don't want to miss this brilliant debut, the success of which will surely herald more books to come.

SONGS FOR THE MISSING by Stewart O'Nan (2008) Viking Penguin, 277 pages

What strikes more fear into a parent's heart than a missing child?

It's the summer of 2005 and for high school senior Kim Larsen, "It was the summer of her Chevette, of J.P. and letting her hair grow. The last summer, the best summer, the summer they'd all dreamed of since eighth grade... an extension of their best year." In what turns out to be their last conversation, on the day before Kim disappears, she takes her bookish younger sister Lindsay to Dairy Queen and tells her, "You know, dude, I'm really going to miss you." Lindsay, in typical teenish disbelief and pitch perfect mumbling monosyllables, retorts, "No you won't."

Once the police are contacted, Lindsay's mom bends under their constant questioning and admits out loud, "I think someone took her." At first it's the extended neighborhood and church community who gather and form teams to comb through areas that Lindsay was known to frequent. Their well-intentioned but limited searching soon gives way to a media frenzy and the investigative support that leads to real answers.

Throughout this harrowing ordeal, Lindsay's parents Fran and Ed don't sit passively waiting for her miraculous return. They turn their attention to schedules for the volunteers, make earnest pleas for radio and television audiences, appear at Lindsay's high school, trying to get her story out to the wider world any way they can. Months pass as the family tries to carve out a new normal--a life without Lindsay in it, though they dare yet to hope for her return.

In a Tennessee Williams turn, it is the kindness of a lonely stranger that finally offers the Larsens the only succor left to them.

SONGS FOR THE MISSING is my first exposure to Stewart O'Nan. His prose is powerful and rife with emotional resonance. Already, I've got his newest novel, EMILY, ALONE, lined up to read next. If it hadn't been for Washington Post Book Critic Ron Charles' enthusiasm for O'Nan's work, I may never have found my way to his books. And, what a shame that would have been.

THE BIG WHY by Michael Winter (2004) House of Anansi Press, 374 pages

Abandon any preconceived notions you have about historical fiction and leap headlong onto the ride that Michael Winter provides in this richly realized imaginative portrait of American painter/engraver Rockwell Kent. (He provided the illustrations for Moby Dick) Although the father to young children and husband to the lovely Kathleen Whiting, Kent is totally feckless. He leaves his family in New York City because he has tired of the superficial art world that has become his bread and butter and travels to Brigus, Newfoundland just before World War One where he dreams of establishing an artists' colony. There he plans to get a house in order and to bring his wife and children from New York once the weather improves in this tiny coastal community.

Winter has breathed real life into Kent and all of his supporting characters, characters from an intimate community where everyone is sure to know each others' business and heartache as predictable as the tide that thrashes against the shore. Always suspicious of any outsider, especially one who dines out on a story of being invited by the Prime Minister, the locals keep a watchful eye on this suspect vegetarian womanizer even as his family settles in for a time.

Kent is surely his own worst enemy, something that he comes to realize after he has hurt those he has loved the most. It is Kent's friendship with Newfoundland's fabled explorer Bob Bartlett, however, that leads him to his existential heart when after disclosing a long-kept secret Bartlett insists, "the question is not were you loved. Or did you love. Or did you love yourself. Or did you allow love to move you, though that's a big one. Move you. The question, Rockwell, is did you get to be who you are. And if not, then why. That, my friend, is the big why."

Did you get to be who you are? It's a profound question. You might begin to form the answer to it by looking in the mirror with Rockwell Kent in Michael Winter's extraordinary novel THE BIG WHY.

ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM by Elizabeth Hay (from the ARC) forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart, April 26, 2011

I am predisposed to like Elizabeth Hay's writing, having adored A STUDENT OF WEATHER (2000), GARBO LAUGHS (2003) and the Giller Prize-winning LATE NIGHTS ON AIR (2007). Plus, she is warm, engaging and attentive in person.

ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM flips back and forth in time between 1929, 1937, 1982, 1999 and 2007 as narrator Anne Flood, driven by curiosity and a need to define herself, explores the lives of the women in her family, especially her father's sister Connie whom she has always admired the most, because of her independence, intelligence and style.

In this early paragraph, Hay offers up the heart of the Anne's story:

"You touch a place and thousands of miles away another place quivers. You touch a person and down the line the ghost of relatives move in the wind....So interwoven are the strands of human life and so rich is the loam in which we lie that the same cemetery holds my grandmother and Ethel Weir and the man accused of her murder and the principal who knew them all, the bane of Connie's existence and therefore an abiding interest of mine."

Yet, we don't begin at the beginning. ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM opens in the Ottawa Valley in August 1937 when "the whole landscape was a painting come to life" on the day that 13-year-old Ethel Weir goes to pick chokecherries, berries "abloom with ghostly light that erased itself" and does not return home. Soon the town has picked a suspect, the young man who "almost stumbled over the corpse." Connie, now a journalist, has recently returned to Canada after working in Europe. In the town library she meets Hannah Soper (Anne's mother) who offers up her mother's boarding house when asked about renting a room. Click click. Part of the unknown future comes into focus.

Time travel back to Jewel, Saskatchewan in 1929 where Connie begins her career as a schoolteacher, working for a seemingly sophisticated but creepy principal, Mr. Ian Burns, known as "Parley." As Anne enigmatically hints, "Given what Parley Burns did and what happened to him in the end, Connie never tired of mulling over what kind of person he was deep down." You'll spend most of the novel puzzling out what Burns actually did in that prairie classroom and wondering whether or not what happened to him in the end is mete and just. Two things galvanize Connie's relationship to Jewel: a devastating fire and her blossoming trust from Michael Graves, one of her students who has been made to feel less than all of his young life. When Connie discovers in 14-year-old Michael what special talents he has and publicly praises him, he offers her a miniature gift: "One afternoon he pocketed a piece of blackboard chalk and returned it days later, setting on her desk a minute bird carved like the tiniest of lilies."

For those of you who have spent time in a classroom, you will know the following to be true as it is for Connie when she awakens in Michael a desire for learning: "A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in the water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it's marvellous for the stone and marvellous for the teacher."

Flash forward to Christmas 1982 where Connie is visiting her brother Jimmy (Anne's dad) and his family in town from Boston where she is back teaching. On Boxing Day, Michael Graves drops by the house to visit with her. Connie's 71 and Michael's 67. Anne, herself married with young children, observes "I had never seen sex mow everything down before. His eyes stayed on her face, assessing, measuring, saying everything for her benefit, waiting." And, later, when Anne shows Michael her mother's paintings, he remarks, "They're beautiful, mysterious and full of meaning."

Many months later Anne and Michael reconnect and she is entranced by his way of interpreting the world."'We forget nothing,' he said. 'It's all there, waiting to be triggered...The facts don't matter....It all blurs and merges and contributes to a way of seeing the world.'" And a decade later at a funeral Michael explains, "A tender, tender thing comes over you when you get this old. It's a marvellous thing when you learn how to live. As my mother said, you give over."

Anne knows what Michael means: "A dead child becomes a flower. A gardener weaves her back into the tapestry of life. It doesn't lessen the tragedy, it makes it resurface every spring, a little shock to the heart."

That is what ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM is in its secrets kept and told. It is a sublime little shock to the heart.

PIGEON ENGLISH by Stephen Kelman (2011) House of Anansi Press, 263 pages

Narrator Harrison Opoku, a recent Ghanaian transplant to London, lives with his older sister Lydia and their mother in one of the housing projects that is bursting with new immigrants and native residents on the dole. Harri is only eleven, but, with his father back in Ghana supporting his grandmother and his baby sister Agnes, he feels he's the man of the house, responsible for the welfare of the women in his life.

PIGEON ENGLISH opens with the discovery of the corpse of a neighborhood boy familiar to Harri. Harri observes that "the dead boy's mama was guarding the blood. The rain wanted to come and wash the blood away but she wouldn't let it. She wasn't even crying, she was just stiff and fierce like it was her job to scare the rain back into the sky." Harri remembers another death he witnessed in Ghana: "An orange lady got hit by a trotro, nobody even saw it coming. I pretended like all the oranges rolling everywhere were her happy memories and they were looking for a new person to stick to so they didn't get wasted." The way Harri processes death is true to my experience with children his age puzzling it out through symbol and analogy that makes sense to them. However, in the projects, in spite of the police appeal for witnesses to come forward, the community responds with complicit silence.

Harri is wide-eyed and keen to absorb the world around him. As a kid, he feels the pressure to try to fit in culturally, so he draws Adidas stripes on his generic running shoes and tries to fill his head with unfamiliar slang: "In England there's a hell of different words for everything. It's for if you forget one, there's always another one left over. Gay and dumb and lame mean all the same. Piss and slash and tinkle meal all the same (the same as greet the chief.)"

Not much escapes Harri's curious gaze and he is as entranced by the idea of the CCTV cameras as extra help for God "for the places where the devil is very strong" as he is by the pigeons who make the housing estate their home, birds he plans to befriend because he admires their ability to fly. If he runs fast enough, he'll be "just like a spirit."

When it's his sister Lydia's birthday, Harri gives her the unexpected gift of being remembered in the future when he spots wet cement that they can jump in and make their mark, then sign their names: "The footprints are there to tell everybody we were here."

Throughout PIGEON ENGLISH, Harri's ebullient attitude towards the new world of which he is now a part reminded me of Baby's matter-of-fact wonder about her equally challenging life in Heather O'Neill's LULLABIES FOR LITTLE CRIMINALS.

The novel is broken down into five sections, marked by the months March through July and each of those sections is affiliated with an emblem that helps Harri interpret the significant changes in his life: airplane, fingerprint, closed circuit camera, waves, and pigeon. Those icons may seem enigmatic to you now, but when you read this tour de force fresh-voiced narrative, you will weep with their resonance.

If my word is not enough, consider what Emma Donoghue wrote about PIGEON ENGLISH. It's "a wonderful novel with a Ghanaian-Londoner child narrator you'll never forget. Simultaneously accurate and fantastical, this boy's love letter to the world made me laugh and tremble all the way through." It's a triumph.

THE MURDERER'S DAUGHTERS by Randy Susan Meyers (2009) St. Martin's Press, 307 pages

Randy Susan Meyers (@randysusanmeyer) joins the list of fabulous women writers whose work I've discovered through the heady cyber company of the book community on Twitter: @AmyMacKinnon @rosannecash @clairecookwrite @robin_black @angie_abdou @julieklam and @EmilyMandel--I've reviewed books by all of them here on my blog.

I've been especially keen to read Meyers' novel knowing that it explores that complicated relationship between a father and his children after he commits a heinous and violent crime.

My mother was raised to believe her father was dead when the truth was he was in prison for fraud, a fact she discovered quite by accident when she was in her early twenties when she met his brother. I know how deprived she felt when the prison chaplain returned her letter insisting that she was better off not knowing the man her father had become. And, though she forged a relationship with her uncle, she never did meet her father, even after he had served his time, because he was too ashamed about abandoning her when she was just a child. It is heartbreaking even now many decades later.

When THE MURDERER'S DAUGHTERS opens in July 1971, Lulu is nine going on ten (her birthday is the next day) and her younger sister Merry is almost six. One night their estranged father pounds on the apartment door and demands that he be let in to talk to their mother. Lulu explains that her father "wanted things he couldn't have" perhaps most of all "he hungered" for her mother and her "pin-up girl façade." Knowing that she's not supposed to let her father into the apartment, Lulu weakens when he reassures her using her pet name: "Don't worry, Cocoa Puff. Mama won't get mad. I promise."

What transpires as a result is shocking and traumatizing. Not only does their father kill their mother, but he also wounds Merry, who spends swaths of time alone in hospital because of the narrow-minded attitudes of her mother's relatives. For a time the girls are raised by their grandmother, but when she dies and no relative will saddle themselves with the responsibility and stigma of the murderer's daughters, Lulu and Merry are put in an orphanage, where they learn to fend for each other at all costs. Even when the girls are fostered out to a wealthy New York doctor and his social worker wife, they realize that they can only really rely on each other.

Told over the course of 30 years, THE MURDERER'S DAUGHTERS is an unconventional bildungsroman that offers what feel like emotionally true perspectives from both the victims and the criminal who tries desperately to make amends.

IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS: STORIES by Robin Black (2010) Random House, 268 pages

Richard Ford says that in literature he found belonging. That literature made him believe in a better place.

His statement has never been truer for me than between the pages of this debut collection of short stories. There were moments that I felt as if Robin Black were whispering in my ear truths about my own life, both those obviously known to the world around me and those I hold secretly in my heart.

In each of the pieces in IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS there are characters coming face to face with real transitions in their lives, moments that are tender and agonizing. For example, in "The Guide" a protective father must offer up to his blind daughter on the cusp of college an opportunity to forge independence; in "If I Loved You" a middle-aged couple struggles with terminal illness and the complication of telling a developmentally delayed son; in "Immortalizing John Parker" a portraitist mourns the loss of a love affair while realizing her subject is dying and wonders about letting go of her past; in "Tableau Vivant a mother worries about her adult daughter's infidelity; in "The History of the World" a recently separated woman finds herself in crisis after an accident while traveling in Italy and discovers through the kindness of a stranger that her lifelong assumptions about herself just might not be true.

Black's hand tapped me on the shoulder and swiveled my head when she wrote in "Divorced, Beheaded, Survived,"

"The truth is that sometimes even more than a day goes by before I remember to think of my brother. It's only natural, I've told myself, time and time again. It's human nature, I've thought--as though there's consolation to be found in that. And maybe there is. Maybe it's a gift to be able to let go of the remembering."

Just as the rare faint scent of Fleurs de Rocaille (my grandmother's perfume) will turn my head on a street, in a theatre, in a bookshop, hopeful in that olfactory moment that she'll round the corner even though she's been gone for 16 years, Black's words bring me to my only brother and how my life "changed utterly" (to reference Yeats) after his accidental death in 1994.

In a recent post Black wrote for Beyond the Margins she explained that there is "the point at which an author gives the story to the reader. Here, I am finished. It belongs to you now. Do with it what you will." That leap of collaborative faith between the writer and the reader is part of the magic of fine fiction. Fiction that helps you find belonging and believe in a better place.

Robin Black's exquisitely drawn portraits of flawed people like you and me in IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS will indeed give you pause. Your heart will skip a beat, or two, and you'll feel all the finer for it.

DEAL BREAKER by Harlan Coben (1995) Random House, 343 pages

Although this is Coben's first Myron Bolitar novel, it's not the first time I've met Myron or his psychotic, but critically helpful, former university roommate Win because I haven't been reading the series in order, but rather as each book finds its way to me.

Myron is building his business as a sports agent and he's guided ably by his assistant Esperanza, a former wrestler known as Pocahontas on the ladies' circuit, who suffers no fools--especially the ones who are bullies. His current high profile client is Christian Steele, a football star whose fiancée Kathy Culver mysteriously disappeared from her university campus 18 months previous. The Culver family recently suffered another unexpected loss when Kathy's father Adam was murdered in his own home in what the police regard as a botched robbery. Myron is not so sure that there was a robbery at all or that Kathy and Adam's cases are unrelated. The cases are complicated by Myron's previous relationship with Kathy's sister Jessica and by his undercover instinct to set the record straight.

One of the aspects of Coben's character building that keeps me hooked is his playfulness with popular culture references. In DEAL BREAKER I was continually amused by the Broadway musical theatre posters that decorate Myron's office walls and Myron's ability to reference a song or a moment from one of those very shows as a way to test his closest friends.

As I have come to expect with Coben's novels, DEAL BREAKER is rife with wit, tension and a messy protagonist's need to make things right.

HOLDING STILL FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE by Zoe Whittall (2009) House of Anansi Press, 296 pages

Don't you just love it when you find a new-to-you writer whose first book is such a treat that you can't wait to get your paws on the next? Even though HOLDING STILL FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE is not Zoe Whittall's first novel (BOTTLE ROCKET HEARTS is), it is the first one of hers that I've read.

An unconventional love triangle between a paramedic (Josh), a former teen-sensation (Billy) and an emerging filmmaker (Amy) is at the heart of this gritty, urban narrative that roams streets familiar to me from the different lives it feels I've led here in Toronto. Though it is decades since I enjoyed my twenties like these three, Whittall triggered memories of what it was like to feel on the cusp of something good and new and true. When every moment felt like a possibility.

In addition to the palpable tension between the main players, I enjoyed the behind the scenes peek at a working life for Emergency Services--the adrenaline rush and necessary emotional distance required of medics and police and firefighters on the front lines of trying to keep us safe from ourselves and each other. It's not only the story Whittall tells that had me hooked, but also the way she tells it. Sentences thrum with the rhythm of life and there are many that reveal her poetic heart. Consider "Canadian art movies" that "exist as though poured from the rusty taps of the local indie rock bar," or "Memories run through her brain like the soft strokes of a watercolour brush." Fantastic, right?

Like Russell Smith, Zoe Whittall slices the piece of the Toronto pie that she knows and loves so well and serves it up in style.

CAUGHT by Harlan Coben (2010) Penguin Canada, 388 pages

High school senior Haley McWaid is a model student, sister and daughter, but when she doesn't return home one night, her parents are right to worry in earnest. Reporter Wendy Tynes is on a mission to identify and confront sexual predators through her nationally televised program Caught in the Act . Dan Mercer is a divorced middle-aged man who works with troubled teens. Their three paths cross unexpectedly and the result is enough to tear a community apart.

With what I have come to regard as trademark intelligence and tension, Harlan Coben has the courage to inhabit each character convincingly so you are kept just enough off balance to second guess yourself about who the actual villains/victims are. Some are obvious, but others are not. Criminal Defense Attorney Hester Crimstein returns in CAUGHT and she is as irascible and sharp-tongued as ever. She will never suffer fools gladly, even if that fool is her own client.

Having read many of Coben's crime novels by now, I continue to be amused by his ability to weave social networking into his plot, so that it is not only a plot device and a tether to our real world, but also a character itself. Here he reminds us how easy it is to fake cyber identities on Facebook and blogs wherein damaging rumours are handily perpetuated.

What I like most about Coben's stories, though, is how he leaves room for the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. As Leonard Cohen wrote, "there is a crack, a crack in everything/ that's how the light gets in."

TIGER, TIGER by Margaux Fragoso (2011) Douglas & McIntyre, 320 pages

Picture this: you are an only child of a phlegmatic jeweler father and a mentally ill mother. You are used to tip-toeing around on figurative eggshells in your own home because tempers flare. Frequently. One day you're swimming at the local pool and introduce yourself to a father figure who seems so much more fun than your own and your mother agrees. Later, your mother will even suggest that maybe he was Jesus in a former life. You are seven when you begin to spend time with this charismatic and caring man who has a house filled with exotic pets he lets you tend and the most lovely and tender mutt named Paws who becomes your friend. His place is a paradise that encourages your imagination to run wild. And you do run wild. And so does he.

Like most pedophiles, 51-year-old Peter Curran preys on the most vulnerable children. Children like Margaux Fragoso who are willing to trust all too easily in a stranger who shows them that he loves them and does not threaten to beat them when they disagree or disobey.

I'm not sure that any book has made me feel so viscerally ill as I read it as TIGER,TIGER did. I kept thinking about my own fortunate childhood and how I didn't have to think about the choices Margaux makes to stay close to Peter until I was well into my twenties. I still can't quite grasp how she was able to write her story of horrific sexual abuse (that lasted 15 years and only ended with Peter's suicide--not a spoiler, by the way) without a whiff of self pity. Her prose is strong and vibrant and her approach unflinchingly honest. And, she is a compelling narrator.

By the end of this harrowing memoir, I felt emotionally gutted, just as I did after watching BLUE VALENTINE. Both have taken exquisite pain and given it full resonant voice in the telling.

THE FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS by Jess Walter (2009) HarperCollins Canada, 290 pages

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

COMBAT CAMERA by A.J. Somerset (2010) Biblioasis, 255 pages

Protagonist Lucas Zane is a burnt-out war photographer who finds himself making rent money working for an odious impresario of low budget pornography, Richard Barker in Mississauga. When an incident with one of the young actresses, Melissa, moves Zane to action, the two of them begin a journey that could possibly lead to their salvation.

The opening of COMBAT CAMERA hooked me. The prose is visceral and clean. Somerset writes like Hemingway by way of Richard Ford, and any of you who know me know how much I admire Ford's work: there's no finer social satirist writing today. Read the first paragraph and you'll understand what I mean:

"The most alarming development now confronting Zane was his suddenly frangible reality. Even his routine moments had become fraught with risk. Suppose, for example, a glint of sunlight was to catch the crack traversing his grime-smeared windshield; a disturbance as trivial as this could inexplicably fracture the entire tableau, could set fragments of his past tilting and sliding through his mind like pieces of coloured glass in a broken kaleidoscope. Things finally come to rest in a jagged landscape of unwelcome memories, and then where in hell are you?"

On almost every page of COMBAT CAMERA there's a found poem, like this one:

frangible reality
routine moments

fraught with risk
could fracture

the entire tableau
could set fragments

of his past
tilting and sliding

like pieces of coloured glass
in a broken kaleidoscope

Somerset never wants for narrative drive nor does he resist describing the horrors that haunt Zane from his experiences as a photographer on the fronts of civil wars in Liberia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone. Each flashback comes in a thoughtfully framed image and I felt as though I were peering over Zane's shoulder daring to take a closer look at each moment with him. Several times those photos brought to mind the work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange--photographers whose visual perspectives defined moments.

Somerset's writing is not surprisingly filmic. He is able to turn a visual image into such convincing prose that it felt consistently as though I were working my way through a photo essay.

Consider the final paragraph as well:

"Zane stood at the window in the failing light and looked out over the freight yard, over gulls wheeling above steel and crushed stone, over wooden railway ties slick with rain, the river beyond sliding and eddying down to meet the sea. A lone man in a rain slicker walked between the rails. He carried a plain aluminum lunch box and a thermos, and with every step his feet slipped in wet gravel. The man walked with his head down, plodding, and Zane watched him until he disappeared behind graffiti-scarred cars that still stood patiently rusting in the endless rain, long after discharging their loads of mysterious freight."

Fantastic, isn't it?

I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Canadian novelist Ray Robertson calls it "a lean, mean piece of story-telling machine" and COMBAT CAMERA won the 2009-2010 Metcalf-Rooke Award.

A.J. Somerset is a writer whose trajectory I am keen to follow. And, to do my bit in promoting his work, I plan to put COMBAT CAMERA on my curriculum for Grade 12 Writer's Craft for 2011-2012. It will be a perfect compliment to Dexter Filkins' series of personal essays in THE FOREVER WAR.