BLACKFLY SEASON by Giles Blunt

Giles Blunt is an award-winning Toronto novelist who has written scripts for Law and Order. His most recent novel BLACKFLY SEASON is set in Ontario's north in the area around Algonquin Park. Detective John Cardinal is relaxing during an off-duty day when a disoriented 20-something woman crosses his path. She doesn't know who she is and when Cardinal takes her to hospital the attending physician discovers a bullet wound in her head, hidden under a tangle of red curls. She has been partially lobotomized by the bullet.

Cardinal suspects the local biker gang might be implicated in the attempted murder. However, questioning leads him to a charismatic character who calls himself "Red Bear" and claims to have Native status. A tale of corruption, greed and control, BLACKFLY SEASON will keep you flipping pages right through to the end.

David Bergen's THE TIME IN BETWEEN

This year's Giller Prize winner weaves a tale of a man lost in place. When his ex-wife is killed in a car crash the protagonist attempts to raise his three small children in a remote area of northern B.C. His eldest daughter who hasn't reached double digits ends up doing most of the parenting. When their father takes a trip to Vietnam, two of the children decide to follow him. What they discover is frightening. THE TIME IN BETWEEN is profoundly moving and speaks to the demons that lurk in all of us.

THE SWEET EDGE by Alison Pick

Written in the style of Carol Shields' he said/she said novel HAPPENSTANCE, Alison Pick's break out novel THE SWEET EDGE is both lyrical and wise. Her protagonists Ellen and Adam decide to take a break from their three-year relationship. Adam embarks on a solitary canoe trip through the Arctic while Ellen tries to find herself among a new group of friends in the trendy gallery district of Toronto.

Pick's prose is exquisite. THE SWEET EDGE is a novel I wish I could have penned, even through moments of self-loathing.

DEAFENING by Frances Itani

Grania, the protagonist of Itani's first novel--a contender for Canada Reads 2006--lost all hearing after a childhood bout of scarlet fever in the early 1900s. She and her family live in a village close to Belleville, Ontario where they run a hotel. When she can no longer be educated sufficiently by her Irish grandmother, Grania is sent to a boarding school for the profoundly deaf. There, the world of communication opens up to her as she learns how to sign as well as to read lips.

As a young adult, Grania meets and falls in love with a young hearing man. They are married two weeks before he leaves her to serve in the ambulance corps during WWI. His journey at the European front is gruelling. Itani's description of what it was like for those young men who fought for our freedom is absolutely harrowing.

THE RED POWER MURDERS by Thomas King

King's publicist sent me the galleys for his forthcoming "Dreadfulwater Mystery" in anticipation for the EVENING OF MYSTERY WRITERS I'm hosting in April.

THE RED POWER MURDERS engages the reluctant investigator/retired cop/now photographer Thumps Dreadfulwater to help the sheriff figure out who has killed a retired FBI agent in the local Holiday Inn and why former activist Noah Ridge has come to Chinook for a book launch and then disappeared.

Fans of King's literary novels will chuckle about his self-deprecating humour and allusions to his own work such as "There had been a Native guy come through with a novel that had the word water in the title. Thumps had gone to the reading and had been barely able to stay awake."

Thumps' wary attitude to remaining involved in the case makes you want to flip the pages all the more to find out whodunnit.

A PERFECT NIGHT TO GO TO CHINA by David Gilmour

Gilmour's most recent novel won this year's Governor General's award for fiction. I took it out of the library yesterday afternoon and didn't put it down until I turned the final page. Roman, the narrator, makes one fatal error. An evening after he has tucked his six-year-old son Simon in bed, Roman decides to walk down the street to his local bar to have a drink. When he returns to his home 3 pints later, his only child is gone.

What follows is Roman's desperate need to find Simon and the lengths to which he deceives himself about Simon's safety. Gilmour uses magical thinking in a way that will make you want to believe it works.

GIRLS OF TENDER AGE by Mary Ann Tirone Smith

My friend Ben says this is the best book of nonfiction he's read this past year, so I bought it yesterday and read it right through. It's about coming of age in the 1950s in a working class area of Hartford, Connecticut. Two things are gripping: ONE: Mary Ann's rapport with her older brother Tyler who is obsessed with World War II books and has never been to school a day in his life; TWO: her community's relationship with a serial predator who sexually molests and sometimes kills pre-adolescent girls.

The memoir is written in two tracks.

On the first track, chronologically we learn about Mary Ann's French and Italian relatives and her incredible bond with Tyler, an undiagnosed autistic, who is shunned by mainstream society. His acute sensitivity to sound means that even the telephone is swaddled so it doesn't upset him. When he is upset, he compulsively gnaws on his wrist until it bleeds. As an adult, Smith reflects that Tyler was her Boo Radley.

The second track reveals the backstory of Robert Malm, a serial predator born in California, who began assaulting pre-adolescent girls when he was only twelve. Their lives cross paths when, after he has served prison time in his twenties, he ends up working near Hartford. He attacks a 17-year-old girl who tells the police and then molests and kills a 10-year-old girl Irene (one of Mary Ann's classmates) when she insists she'll tell her mother. You are satisfied that he is suitably punished when Smith takes you step by step through his appeal ("I didn't mean to kill her.") and then to the executioner's chair where his end is horrific in order to save his eyes for donation.

Unbelievably gripping and honest, GIRLS OF TENDER AGE, is a must read.

BLOOD SPORTS by Eden Robinson

BLOOD SPORTS is a gripping and grim tale about the consequences faced by a couple of junkies from Vancouver who have become clean and sober. Tom and his cousin Jeremy have a brutal cat-and-mouse history that usually ends up with Jeremy controlling Tom. Tom and his girlfriend Paulie have a young daughter Mel whom they adore. Tom talks to the police and ends up being a pawn in a game in which he may lose everything.

BLOOD SPORTS is not for those who are squeamish, but it is compelling.

Thomas King writes about Eden Robinson that she "is one of those rare artists who comes to writing with a skill and maturity that has taken the rest of us decades to achieve." High praise, indeed.

SNOW by Orhan Pamuk

IMPAC-award-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk's most recent novel chronicles the life of Ka, an exiled poet, who returns to his native land. Over the course of four days, Ka travels to the forlorn town of Kars to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head scarves. There Ka is reunited with a former university friend, the recently-divorced and radiant Ipek.

"Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek's ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist called Blue...A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding God may be a prelude to losing everything else...SNOW is of immense relevance to our present moment."

John Updike remarks that this novel is "a major work...conscience ridden and carefully wrought...Pamuk is Turkey's most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize."

STARLIGHT TOUR: THE LAST, LONELY NIGHT OF NEIL STONECHILD by Susanne Reber and Rob Renaud

On a brutally cold night at the end of November in 1990, 17-year-old Neil Stonechild went missing just blocks from his mother Stella's downtown Saskatoon home. Five days later his frozen body was found several kilometers outside of town. A cursory police investigation neglected the obvious trauma to Stonechild's face and wrists, and the curious fact that he was missing a shoe.

STARLIGHT TOUR, written by two veteran CBC producers, is an engrossing tale of cops, racism, and a native urban legend coming horrifyingly true.

Stylistically modelled after Truman Capote's haunting IN COLD BLOOD, this exploration of the last lonely night of Neil Stonechild is a must read. It paints " a damning portrait of obstruction of justice and justice denied, not only to a boy and his grieving mother, but to an entire country's aboriginal community."

700 Sundays by Billy Crystal

When Crystal's father Jack died unexpectedly of a heart attack when Crystal was only 15, Crystal estimated that they'd shared 700 Sundays together. This conceit frames the memoir as well as the Tony-Award-winning one-man show that Crystal continues to perform across North America.

I didn't realize that the family was at the heart of the Commodore label in NYC that cut early records of now jazz legends Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong. Crystal even saw the movie SHANE with the iconic Ms. Holiday who shouted at the screen "He ain't never comin' back" when another child in the audience implored, "Come back, Shane. Come back."

One of my favourite moments happens between Billy and his grandfather Julius who tells him, "Time's a bastard, Billy. When you're sad, there's too much of it and when you're happy, there's never enough."

Treat yourself to this gem.

DUE PREPARATIONS FOR THE PLAGUE

Janette Turner Hospital's most recent novel is chilling. In a post-911 world she examines issues of paranoia, security and trust. Her protagonists are all connected to a doomed Air France flight that is hi-jacked by a fundamentalist sect. They are either child survivors or relatives to those who perished during the hostage-taking.

What was extraordinary to me were the confessions that each of the hostages made about the nature of love and passion before they accepted their individual fates of sure and painful death by inhaling the toxic substances pumped into the room where they were collectively imprisoned.

Turner Hospital knows how to get to the heart of what matters and tells a compelling tale in the process.

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING by Joan Didion

I started reading Didion's memoir around 10:30 last night and stayed up until I finished it at 2:30 this morning. She begins by suggesting that "life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant." And, anyone, who has experienced an unexpected death in their life will nod in agreement. Didion's world changed on December 30, 2003 when her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a "massive coronary event" at the dinner table in their New York apartment.

What compelled me to continue reading in addition to my own experience with the ongoing grief journey was Didion's "cool customer" approach to retelling the emotional upheaval of the first year of new loss. Hers was complicated by the fact that her only child, Quintana, was in a coma at the same time. Unthinkable timing.

As Didion soldiers on to accommodate the loss in her life she offers the following sage advice: "...if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water."

CUTTY, ONE ROCK by August Kleinzahler

As one of the blurbs on the back of this memoir attests, "this is a beautiful book-- mournful, swaggering, bleak, hilarious-- full of piercing and often loving assessments of life and art." What moved me most was the title piece about Kleinzahler's doomed and big-hearted brother, which reminded me of my own brother who died young in 1994.

Eerily, I find myself in Kleinzahler's description of his own teenaged self and how he related to his only brother as I did mine: "I couldn't have made for very thrilling company. But he always acted glad to see me...'You'll be all right,' he'd say smiling. 'Let's go out and see if we can't find ourselves a drink.' I miss having someone like that in my life. I miss it like a limb."

And I still do.

GLENN by David Young

This play by Toronto playwright David Young explores the aspects of Gould's intriguing personality which he scripts as the Prodigy, Performer, Perfectionist and Puritan. Each character manages to play independently yet paradoxically be utterly entwined, since the conceit of the play is that we are inside Glenn Gould's head. The clever underlying framework for the piece is Bach's "The Goldberg Variations" which made Gould an international star.

THE SONG BENEATH THE ICE by Joe Fiorito

Toronto novelist Joe Fiorito's book THE SONG BENEATH THE ICE is quintessentially Canadian in theme and content. An eccentric concert pianist reminiscent of Glenn Gould goes missing after he bounds from a fundraising performance at the AGO. His close childhood friend receives a series of audiotapes and journals in the mail and is compelled to try to discover why the pianist disappeared and where he has gone.

THE WONDER SPOT by Melissa Bank

Melisaa Bank found international attention with her first book of stories called THE GIRLS GUIDE TO HUNTING AND FISHING. In her new collection of linked stories, THE WONDER SPOT, Sophie Applebaum faces trials and tribulations in the grown-up working world of New York City advertising and publishing. For those of you who came of age in the early 1980s, Bank's new book will have particular resonance.

ALLIGATOR by Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore's first novel is as filmic as her short story collection OPEN. Her training as a visual artist is obvious in her acute attention to sensory detail. She inhabits each of the characters in ALLIGATOR with absolute credibility, which means she's as equally convincing as a teenaged eco-terrorist wannabe and as a middle-aged filmmaker ignoring heart trouble.

Nominated once again for the GILLER PRIZE for the best Canadian book of fiction in English, Lisa Moore's fresh style may turn the heads of this year's prize jury: Warren Cariou, Elizabeth Hay and Richard Wright.

WOMAN IN BRONZE by Antanas Sileika

Set in Lithuania pre-WWI and then in Paris of the 1920s, the novel traces the progress of a young sculptor who wants to make his way among the talent in Montparnasse. It is an accurate portrayal of a spare artist's life and beautifully depicts the process of creating a bronze. You meet real people from that time including the fantastic Josephine Baker and the hugely talented Jacques Lipschitz (who had a solo show in Toronto at the AGO in 1989).

THE BEAUTIFUL WIFE by Leon Rooke

Leon Rooke's new book is a magical realist marvel of a novel. THE BEAUTIFUL WIFE is such a multi-layered treat-- part political expose of the Marcos regime in the Phillipines, part treatise on love and its pursuit. If you like the whimsy of Jasper Fforde (THE EYRE AFFAIR and LOST IN A GOOD BOOK), pick up this readerly romp penned by one of Canada's national treasures.