THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS by Roddy Doyle

Paula Spencer tells her own story of falling in love with Charlo, a bad boy, and her early married days of complete devotion and bliss. The present, however, is far less romantic. Mother to four children, a single parent of a year, Paula learns that her estranged spouse has been killed by the Garda, having murdered a bank manager's wife. The detail that upsets her the most, is not his death, but the fact that the woman's autopsy revealed that he had slapped her face twice. That gesture opens up a chasm of past abuse that Paula recounts matter-of-factly until she leads up to the day that her husband considered beating their own daughter. That was the tipping point for Paula.

Doyle creates tremendous sympathy and writes a convincing portrait of this working class woman who endured years of spousal abuse because she believed her husband still loved her.

THE DEPORTEES by Roddy Doyle (2007)

This collection of short fiction resurrects one of Doyle's earlier characters, Jimmy Rabbitte (of The Barrytown Trilogy). Here, in the titular story, Jimmy's got an idea for another band in post-Celtic Tiger Dublin. Every player has to be an immigrant--no white faces aloud, bejeesus.

Throughout the stories here Doyle explores race and prejudice and roots for the underdogs all the while.

A WOLF AT THE TABLE by Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs's most recent creative nonfiction is about his memoires of his father, a math professor at an east coast university. Slowly, the narrative wends its way to the kernel of truth that depends on whether or not you believe the lead that as a small child Augusten traipsed with his father into the woods to bury a body.

Typically unsentimental Burroughs reveals this story sentence by sentence and creates a sympathetic portrait of his older brother Chris, who when it matters most teaches the young Augusten a lesson he'll never forget.

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS by Lola Jaye (forthcoming 2008)

Lola Jaye's debut novel confronts grief and the notion of continuing bonds with the deceased in a fresh voice.

Opening in 1990, seven years after the death of her young father, Lois Bates is at her mom's wedding to "some prick she met down the bingo." Lois is a typical twelve-year-old who receives an unexpected and atypical gift: "The Manual" her dying father wrote for her projecting the kind of advice he would have liked to have given her face-to-face as she grew up.

His instructions are clear: read each entry on your birthday from age 12-30; don't peep ahead; please flip back through past entries.

Through the course of the entries Lois learns a lot about her father's adolescence and young adulthood as he projects that his own preoccupations (like a first kiss, burgeoning sexuality, the job interview) will be hers as well. By having access to her father's narrative voice, Lois feels his presence all the more palpably in her life. His words begin to fill the void he created between them when he died when Lois was only five, an age when there "is the strange luxury of not recalling the actual moment it happened...the realization that the man who'd read me stories at night, kissed me good night, every night, was no longer breathing in the same air as me."

Lois is a plucky protagonist and it's a bit dreamy to snoop over her shoulder in By The Time You Read This.

AWAY by Amy Bloom (2007)

I haven't read anything by Amy Bloom, but picked up AWAY because my friend Joe (a discerning reader and all round nice guy) recommended it.

Protagonist Lillian Leyb comes to America in 1924 after her family has been destroyed during a pogrom in Russia. Determined to make a new life for herself, Lillian finds work as a seamstress in a Yiddish theatre company in New York. Soon she finds herself living with the handsome, but gay, leading man to serve as a cover for him while she beds his own father who is fully aware that his only son is a fagola.

Lillian's life is turned upside down once again when her cousin arrives and tells her that her 4 year-old daughter Sophie is believed to be alive and living with former neighbours who rescued her. That news leads to Lillian's determined departure and journey to find her Sophie that finds her relying on the kindness of strangers including a prostitute in Seattle, a widower in Alaska and self-proclaimed bachelor who tends to her wounds.

Lillian encounters such tenderness in the most unexpected places and it is that emotional truth that kept me turning the pages to the satisfying end.

MAD WEEKEND by Roddy Doyle (2006)

Written for the Open Door book series in Ireland that benefits the author's charity of choice, MAD WEEKEND follows the antics of three Dublin lads, Dave, Pat and Ben, who have been friends since childhood and who now, in their twenties, decide to go for a long weekend in Liverpool to support their favourite soccer team.

Dave and Pat chat up some local girls in a pub while Ben excuses himself to go to the bog (toilet). Problem is, Ben disappears.

If you haven't read any Roddy Doyle, this little book is a perfect way to dip in to his dialogue and to observe the shenanigans so many of his characters get themselves up to.

SPILLING THE BEANS by Clarissa Dickson Wright (2007)

This candid and unsentimental memoir by one of the "Two Fat Ladies" will take your breath away. Wright's childhood was spent in the shadow of her much older siblings and her tyrannical, alcoholic father (who happened to be a brilliant and sought after surgeon) who smacked Clarissa and her heiress mother around whenever it occured to him. Clarissa was also clever and totally determined and became the youngest woman ever called to the bar in the UK at the age of 21.

Her life falls apart when her beloved mother dies unexpectedly and Clarissa spends the following decade drinking herself into a stupour and partying away her entire inheritance. Only when she finally becomes sober does Clarissa find happiness and success with her unlikely partner in the Fat Ladies franchise.

There is no self pity in this book and it is rife with gossipy bits about the Royal family passed along as though it were mess hall conversation.

NINETY YEARS WISE by Doris McCarthy (2004)

Our pre-eminent landscape painter who happens to be a woman takes you into her summer embrace on Georgian Bay where you spend the season with her as she sketches, cooks and paints her legendary canvases. As with the two previous instalments of her memoirs, McCarthy is breezy and intimate immediately. She credits her good health and longevity (98 this year and still painting) to eating and drinking in moderation and to daily exercise with leg weights.

3 by Roddy Doyle: THE SNAPPER (1990), THE VAN (1991) and PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA (1993)

When I recently learned that Roddy Doyle would highlight the fall event that I am co-chairing, I reached for several of his books to refamiliarize myself with his work.

Many of you will be familiar with his Barrytown trilogy: THE COMMITMENTS, THE SNAPPER, THE VAN from the feature films that were adapted from each of them. All three novels follow the Rabbitte family, a motley crew of lovable "ne-er do wells" who live in the projects in Dublin. It is Doyle's talent in writing authentic dialect that makes each of these books sing.

PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA is a triumph of childhood narrative from the perspective of 10-year-old Paddy who fumbles his way through the schoolyard and home life where the tension between his parents is palpable. Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize for this book in 1993 (beating out Canadian favourite Carol Shields' THE STONE DIARIES). Fellow novelist Nick Hornby calls Roddy Doyle "the best novelist of his generation."

I'm looking forward to laughing out loud along with Doyle's other characters in THE COMMITMENTS, A STAR CALLED HENRY, THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS and THE DEPORTEES before meeting him in October.

TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN by James Lee Burke (2007)

Set in New Orleans in the weeks following the devastation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN offers up people under extremis at their best and their worst. Among other places Burke takes us into the dome where many victims were "rescued" and where looters and criminals raped with abandon among the human waste. Talk about "man's inhumanity to man."

In the through line of the narrative, a young black criminal tries to make right all of his wrongs by apologizing to the family of the girl he gang-raped a few years previous and offering them blood diamonds he stole from the local Mafia hood as compensation.

TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN will make you feel like you are there, swirling in the detritus along with local cop Dave Robichaux. But, don't take my word for it. Go to Ian Rankin's website and find out why he calls Burke's new book the best book he read in 2007.
www.ianrankin.net

THE CHAMELEON'S SHADOW by Minette Walters (2007)

My friend Helen has encouraged me for years to read Minette Walters and this recent novel was my first go round. Walters doesn't shy away from gruesome detail if it develops character or pushes the plot forward, nor does she pussyfoot around bad human behaviour and its consequences. Satisfyingly, the evil characters (both male and female) get caught in THE CHAMELEON'S SHADOW but not before you are led on an adrenhaline-pumping chase that touches on prostitution, crack-cocaine, spousal abuse and death in the line of duty.

ORPHEUS LOST by Jeanette Turner Hospital (2007)

Leela is a mathematics post-doc fellow who is captivated with numbers in musical instruments and her boyfriend Mishka is a passionate musician who plays the violin and the oud, a Persian instrument like a lute. They are both obsessed with their avocations and committed to each other. Committed, that is, until Mishka meets a Muslim student in a class at Harvard who claims to know his father in Beirut. That piece of information turns Mishka's world upside down.

Using the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as a motif, Turner Hospital probes the terrifying underworld that threatens to draw both Mishka and Leela down. Past and present are masterfully linked in this story of love, fear and terror. It is all too convincing not to be real.

If you liked DUE PREPARATIONS FOR THE PLAGUE, you will love this book.

BLOOD FROM A STONE by Donna Leon

When a Senegalese "vu cumpra" is murdered in broad daylight in front of a group of American tourists who are gawking at his wares (fake Versace, Gucci and Louis Vuitton bags produced by the same factories that make the authentic ones!), Inspector Brunnetti finds himself curiously compelled to solve the death at the hands of a professional killer.

What Brunnetti discovers leads him to co-opt one of his father's oldest friends, a discreet Venetian gem dealer. And, as the layers of government corruption are peeled away, Brunnetti realizes what matters most.

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.