LIPSTICK JUNGLE by Candace Bushnell (2005)

The SEX AND THE CITY guru has spun a similar tale of powerful 40-something women in this novel essentially about greed. Nico is a publishing maven having an affair with a Calvin Klein underwear model at least a decade younger than she is; Victory, a hot fashion designer dating a billionaire and Wendy a movie mogul and wannabe supermom whose handsome husband stays at home to raise the kids and spend her money on essentials like a pony from the Palm Beach Polo Club for their twelve year old daughter.

I had at least hoped for wit in LIPSTICK JUNGLE, like some of the bantering between Samantha and Miranda on the HBO series that made Bushnell a millionaire, but there was nary a guffaw.

I'm not sure I'll even bother tuning in to the upcoming tv series starring Brooke Shields to see if the screenwriters have doctored the script.

BE NEAR ME by Andrew O'Hagan (2006)

I've been a fan of O'Hagan's fiction since OUR FATHERS and quickly grabbed PERSONALITY when it was released and now BE NEAR ME which is the most sophisticated narrative of the three. It is O'Hagan's deftness with diction, dialogue and character development that makes BE NEAR ME such a compelling read.

Middle-aged RC priest Father David Anderton has a small parish in Scotland where he is viewed as an outsider, having been raised in Yorkshire and schooled at Oxford. He befriends local troublemaking teens Mark and Lisa and tries to open up their world by guiding them through unimaginable experiences (to them) like taking a boat to Ailsa Craig, a bird sanctuary beyond their ken.

Father David is haunted by his past sadness and in a daring moment of a kiss, time bends in on itself and he finds himself struggling for belief in a faithless age.

DIVISADERO by Michael Ondaatje (2007)

Anna and her foundling "twin" Claire are raised by their father alongside Coop, an orphan from a neighbouring farm in California in the 1950s. When a brutal act of violence splits the makeshift family, Anna reinvents herself and it is her story we follow primarily to the present where she is researching the life work of a French writer Lucien Segura in a rural village in the south of France. Time folds in on itself and bends backwards.

Coop[er] also skips town and becomes a talented gambler, but his life in such a fast lane is problematic. It is only Claire who seems to truly move forward in her life trajectory as an assistant to a criminal lawyer.

BIrds are everywhere in DIVISADERO, symbols of wish fulfilment and the dream of escape.

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS by Giles Blunt (2006)

Giles Blunt's most recent Detective Cardinal mystery raises the stakes when Cardinal is called to the scene of an apparent suicide and discovers his wife Catherine was the jumper. A talented photographer and a woman who has suffered and struggled with depression, in some ways it is not surprising, albeit truly a shock, that she has killed herself. However, something does not sit right with Cardinal. In spite of his grief he resolves to find out who could have pushed Catherine over the edge both literally and metaphorically. What he discovers through forensics and common sense is a whole new terrifying kind of criminal.

WHO'S KILLING THE GREAT WRITERS OF AMERICA? by Robert Kaplow (2007)

I saw this loopy mystery advertised in the Sunday New York Times and had to pick it up because I loved Kaplow's earlier book ME AND ORSON WELLES. His latest offering is high satire and ripe parody of the storytelling styles of Danielle Steel, Curtis Sittenfeld, Tom Clancy, Sue Grafton and Stephen King. Each writer is swiftly murdered in a manner typically endured by victims in their own novels. Kaplow playfully skewers Steve Martin, Gerard Depardieu, Cole Porter and Michiko Kakatani, among other pop cultural icons. If you're ready for distraction and laugh out loud capers, pick up WHO'S KILLING THE GREAT WRITERS OF AMERICA.

HOME SCHOOLING by Carol Windley (2006)

This short story collection made it to last year's shortlist for the Giller Prize, and having read all of the stories I find it difficult to believe that the book didn't win. Windley's stories are haunting and in each narrative characters confront sorrow and longing. The descriptive detail is exquisite and evocative and Windley's ability to honor the ordinariness of life puts her in league with Carol Shields and Alice Munro.

PIECE OF MY HEART by Peter Robinson (2006)

My greatest surprise in this Inspector Banks mystery is that nowhere do we read the lyrics in Joplin's refrain that gives the novel its title. PIECE OF MY HEART follows parallel narratives thirty years apart. In 1969, there's been a brutal murder at an outdoor rock concert of a beautiful young woman named Linda Lofthouse. And, it seems that the killer has a penchant for painting little blue cornflowers on his victim's faces.

More than thirty years later Banks investigates an equally gruesome murder of a freelance music journalist who seemed to be researching a controversial piece about the band the Mad Hatters. Discovering how the murders are linked provides Banks with difficult truths about the past and the present.

THE END: HAMBURG 1943 by Hans Erich Nossack

Translated from the German by Joel Agee, this eye-witness account is a little piece of perfection about the Allied bombing of Hamburg from a German survivor's perspective, a meditation on war and hope. The following two excerpts will give you a sense of it:

Now all that was left of the steeple was a pitifully rotted and blackened stump. It had broken off right above the clock, the hour hand was pointing to shortly after one; but was it noon or midnight? And on what date? Above the clock you could still see the word "Gloria" in gold letters. The copper of the roof had draped itself over the nave like a shroud. Only way in back , on a remnant of the sacristy, the golden saint still stood with his steering wheel, pointing a finger into the distance.

and

So I wrapped a wet blanket around my head and crawled out. Then we went through the fire. Some people keeled over in the street then. We couldn't take care of them. ~ November 1943

THE LIAR'S CLUB by Mary Karr (1995)

I picked up this memoir because Stephen King remarks about Karr's extraordinary ability to recreate her childhood with exceptional detail in his biblical tract ON WRITING. I love that she begins with a quotation from Pound's CANTOS--"nothing matters but the quality of the affection in the end that has carved the trace in the mind." So much of what follows is removed from that affection, because Karr's childhood is one rife with horrors great and small.

She leaps right in with a sharp, dark memory when she is seven or eight and being asked by the family doctor to "show me the marks. Please? Just pull this up and show me where it hurts." So much of Karr's narrative hurts. Yet, she has a remarkable way of offering up what happened without blame. That she is able to forgive her mother her outrageously irresponsible behaviour is reason enough to read THE LIAR'S CLUB to negotiate similar paths of forgiveness.

CAUGHT STEALING by Charlie Huston (2004)

Talk about narrative drive! In CAUGHT STEALING, Hank Thompson does a favour for his neighbour Russ by looking after his cat Bud. That favour leads to the unravelling of Hank's life as he knew it. He ends up being beaten by Russian thugs, plays high-stakes hide and seek with dirty cops in the NYPD, rides the subway through Manhattan with a dead body at his side, finds his ex-girlfriend in a compromising position and ends up sitting on the floor of a storage unit in Chelsea counting out laundered bills that add up to over 4 million. At least the cat survives.

SHOOTING WATER by Devyani Saltzman (2005)

The daughter of esteemed filmmaker Deepa Mehta, Devyani Saltzman chronicles the difficult journey of making the final film in her mother's trilogy EARTH, FIRE and WATER, but more importantly honestly reflects on the strained relationship she's had with her famous mother since she chose at the time of separation to live with her father.

WATER was plagued with issues during its initial production schedule in India in 1999 when government officials declared that its portrayal of the Hindu widows was false. Locals even built an effigy of Mehta and burned it as well as the sets to the ground.

With new financing, and under the working title FULL MOON, the production starting shooting five years later in Sri Lanka. In Spring 2007 WATER was Canada's submission for the best foreign film at the Academy Awards.

SHOOTING WATER not only helped me to understand the process of film production but also to appreciate Saltzman's honesty about herself and about her resolve to mend the holes in the rapport with her mother.

ON CHESIL BEACH by Ian McEwan (2007)

Set in 1962, McEwan's novella charts the journey of newlyweds Florence and Edward, two tentative lovers who discover that what remains unsaid can be hugely damaging to any relationship.

THE CRUELLEST MONTH by Louise Penny (2007)

The charming and inscrutable Inspector Gamache is called to Three Pines to investigate the suspicious death of Madeleine Favreau, a fairly recent addition to the community. When a medium is invited to town to hold a seance to spice up the lives of the residents, the ante is upped when they all decide to move the experience to the Hadley house. In this sad home known for its haunting, it seems that the lovely Madeleine has been literally scared to death.

With a series of red herring clues and the typically helpful cast of stock characters including Clara and Peter, Olivier and Gabri, Gamache and his team of investigators solve the mystery in a surprising way which involves embracing the notion that trees have feelings and that the past is never really past.

LOVE WALKED IN by Marisa De Los Santos (2005)

When Martin Grace walks into the hip Philadelphia coffee shop that Cornelia Brown manages, her life alters. This new-found Cary-Grant-look-alike love is the harbinger of greater changes to come. Across town, eleven-year-old Clare Hobbs is abandoned by her mentally ill mother and decides to go looking for her lost father. Clare and Cornelia's paths cross and the two form an unlikely and improbable friendship. De Los Santos invokes the power of classic films to illuminate the mystery and wonder of love in all its permutations.

THE BLACK BOOK by Ian Rankin (1993)

There are several black books that give this gripping Rebus tale its title. When a close colleague is brutally attacked, Detective Rebus is drawn into a cold case that involves a hotel fire, the privileged playboy son of a banker, an unidentified corpse and a long forgotten night of terror and murder. HIs nemesis Ger Cafferty figures slyly. Rebus has to try to decode the secrets in his colleague's notebook to piece together a jigsaw of clues that no-one wants completed.

THE MISTRESS'S DAUGHTER by A.M. Homes (2007)

I read a review of this memoir in the Sunday New York Times and decided to pick it up. I admire Homes's short fiction, with its spare prose and directness, so thought at least stylistically I would like her memoir. Her birth mother contacts her through a lawyer and the eventual reunion is fraught with neediness. When her birth father decides to get in the game as well, Homes finds herself agreeing to a paternity test which determines that they are a 99.9% match. Though, she knew he was her blood relative with one glimpse of his ass. Her ass. The power of genetic determination.

When Homes finally unpacks the boxes of her birth mother's life, your heart will crack just a little. Throughout, Homes reassures that her real parents are the people who raised her in a loving home. And, it is her mother who telephones to tell her that her mother died, not the lawyer.

DEATH AND JUDGMENT by Donna Leon (1995)

Set in Venice and its environs, DEATH AND JUDGMENT is another of Leon's Commissario Brunetti crime novels. A truck crashes on a treacherous bend in the mountains of Northern Italy, spilling a surprising cargo of young sex trade workers being smuggled. A few days later a prominent international lawyer is found dead aboard an intercity train at Santa Lucia. Commissario Brunetti wonders if the two tragedies could be related.

His quest for truth leads him to a seedy Venetian bar and a crime network that stretches beyond the lagoon. It will take at least another gruesome death before Brunnetti and his colleagues begin to understand what is really going on.

Pick up Donna Leon's books. She will keep you flipping pages in earnest.

SERENDIPITY ROAD by Catherine DeVrye (2007)

SERENDIPTY ROAD chronicles DeVrye’s personal journey. Abandoned as a baby, she was adopted by loving parents in Calgary. When DeVrye was 21, her parents died of cancer within a year of each other.

When DeVrye packed her bags and arrived jobless in Australia, she began to find her place—but not before she waited tables, taught phys. ed., worked on a mine site and became a public servant. Later she joined IBM where she was posted in Tokyo, Hong Kong and New York.

Named Australian Executive Woman of the Year, Catherine found herself dining with princes, prime ministers and Olympic athletes. In her down time she cycled over the Andes, dived with sharks and climbed Kilimanjaro.

When DeVrye decided to search for her biological parents, her adventures really began.

COME AWAY by Anne Hines (2007)

In COME AWAY, U of T professor Reggie Niefeild has devoted his academic life to unraveling the mystery of the baffling erotic love poem that has disturbed clergy for over two thousand years. In a parallel plot, Shahiroz, a young Jewish woman, priestess of the goddess Asherah, is confronted with exile from Babylon with a return to Jerusalem and to a strange and solitary god called Yahweh.

COME AWAY suggests startling truths about the genesis of the Bible, our Western concept of God and of love itself.

BETWEEN TRAINS by Barry Callaghan (2007)

BETWEEN TRAINS is Callaghan’s eagerly anticipated and already celebrated collection of short fiction inhabited by characters including gangsters, Shoah survivors, priests and the idle rich. In spite of having no faith, they try desperately to believe; though their hearts have been broken, they try desperately to love; though they feel forgotten, they try desperately to tell their stories. In the most daring story of the collection, Callaghan provides true appeal for retributive justice.