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.

KICK BACK by Val McDermid

Detective Kate Brannigan uncovers a mortgage theft scam that is run by a salesman who works for a greenhouse building company. In addition to fraud, this novel keeps you flipping through it because of twisted relationships between the characters. I can easily lose myself in such a fast-paced tale.

A PLACE OF EXECUTION by Val McDermid

I've recently become interested in murder mystery writing. A friend gave me McDermid's book insisting that she wrote at the top of her game. Set in a remote village in northern England, A PLACE OF EXECUTION is fast-paced and thought-provoking. It addresses the failure of the justice system and the messiness of ethical decisions and their ramifications. I was not disappointed and have picked up another McDermid book to see if she really is such a consistently fine storyteller.

NIGHT by Elie Wiesel

This brave and haunting memoir written by the Nobel Prize winner demands to be read over and over again. Wiesel is just a boy when he and his family are taken to Auschwitz and then he is moved to Buchenwald with his father. What astonishes me each time I read this book is how he manages to remain a man of faith in face of the atrocities he witnessed and experienced.

UNION STATION by Joe Fiorito

I went to Fiorito's launch of this non-fiction collection of essays about who we are now in Toronto on Tuesday night. Many of the people about whom Fiorito has written were there as well including the Nigerian cab driver whose son Fiorito has the privilege of calling Joseph after a naming ceremony and Enza-the-supermodel Anderson, the drag queen (and occasional mayoral candidate) who finally got the breast implants she desired.

It is a raw look at Toronto. At our kindnesses, cruelties and foibles.

Fans of Fiorito's column must read this book.

LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN by Alice Munro

I've just re-read this fantastic collection of linked short fiction published first in 1971. It is a progressive book for its time--so progressive that several libraries chose to ban the book because of its explicit depiction of Del's coming of age and growing awareness of her sexuality.

Alice Munro is a must-read author. Dip and then delve into her body of work.

THE QUEEN'S FOOL by Phillipa Gregory

Set in the early English Renaissance during the reigns of "Bloody" Mary and Elizabeth I, this historical novel follows the life of a young Jewish girl who has moved from Spain to England with her bookseller father to escape persecution that led to her mother's death at the stake.

Dressed in the clothes of a young boy, she piques the interest of one of the courtiers who invites her to become the fool in the court of the invalid boy/king. She then befriends Mary and Elizabeth and serves as a spy reporting between their two royal camps.

It is a novel filled with intriguing historical anecdotes and credible characters.

MARLEY AND ME by John Grogan

For any doglovers, this memoir, that is a New York Times bestseller will affirm your loyalty to your furry four-footed companions. Grogan unabashedly recounts Marley's really bad behaviour, but reminds us that Marley approaches everything with joyful ebullience.

THE PROJECTIONIST by Michael Helm

Set in late 80s small town Saskatchewan, this novel reveals Toss Raymond's fierce loyalty to his remaining family (his Aunt Cora and her son Perry) and his emotional exhuberance for other social misfits like himself (including Dewey, the projectionist at the dilapitated movie house.)

Toss has a history of violence and in the recent past his wife Marcie has left him because of rumour and misunderstanding that so easily passes from mouth to gossipping mouth.

Toss is a crusader for truth. And he's willing to face his own demons to find it.

THE PROJECTIONIST is Michael Helm's first novel and it was short-listed for The Giller Prize. His prose is deft, rhythmic and clean. Read this book!

CITY OF FALLING ANGELS by John Berendt

Berendt's book will make you fall in love with the intrigue of Venice. He arrives just as the world-famous Fenice opera house is burning to the ground and decides to stay for several years. Through the course of Berendt's time in Venice we meet several ex-pats who have also made the canal city their home.

Woody Allen had been scheduled to play a jazz concert at the Fenice and instead plays a benefit to raise funds for its reconstruction but not before he is charged with trespassing in the company of the mayor.

Ezra Pound's longtime mistress, Olga Rudge (a violinist and Vivaldi expert) dies at 101, but not before her "friends" the Rylands who run the Guggenheim museum try to set up an Ezra Pound Foundation and convince her to sell all of his papers to them for $7000--a pittance when a few years later his private book collection of first editions signed by most of the authors sells for
$1 000 000.

Then there is the famous Murano glassblower who tries to recapture the night of flames in a limited edition of vases--still contested as his estate remains unsettled years after his death because of a family feud between his sons, the heirs.

Berendt's book is as intriguing as his billet-doux to Savannah: MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL. And, it is rife with a cast of memorable real life characters.

THE GREEK FOR LOVE by James Chatto

Chatto's memoir of falling in love with Greece is grounded in his early experience there with his newly pregnant wife Wendy in the early 1980s as they renovate a little home overlooking the sea. There she gives birth to their first son Joe and then several years later to their second son Ford a.k.a. "Nibby."

When Nibby is beginning to toddle, he drops to the floor one day as he is called for his bath. He can't get up. They discover that he has leukemia and he dies within weeks of receiving treatment back in London where Chatto's mother lives. When James and Wendy return to the little village where they began their family, the local people embrace their loss in a way that helps them to face their grief.

GHOST RIDER: TRAVELS ON THE HEALING ROAD by Neil Peart

RUSH drummer and lyricist Neil Peart embarks on a motorcycle journey across North America and south into Mexico to avoid his first Christmas alone following the death of his only child Selena (who was killed in a car crash on her way to university in Toronto) and the subsequent death of his spouse Jackie who died of cancer within 7 months, though Peart claims it wasn't cancer, but a broken heart that did her in.

This memoir is part travelogue, part journal, part letter-writing and reveals Peart's emotional and geographical journey back to life. It is brave, sensitive and honest.

AN AUDIENCE OF CHAIRS by Joan Clarke

A former actress and painter ends up institutionalized for having abandoned her two small daughters as she is caught up in the creative flush of a new canvas. She spends the rest of her life trying to reconnect with the world with the faint hope of being able to remeet her grown children. When she discovers one of her daughters will be marrying in nearby Halifax, she decides to go to witness the wedding as an uninvited guest.

THE DAUGHTER OF TIME by Josephine Tey

Classic detective fiction, this novel finds Scotland Yard's Inspector Grant bedridden in hospital going a little stir-crazy during his recovery. A friend distracts him with historical portraits and Grant becomes obsessed with a portrait of Richard III in which the face of the famous evil hunchback doesn't quite fit its illustrious reputation. Grant's curiousity leads him to revisit British history and reveal the truth about the murder of the Princes in the Tower of London.

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.