PUPPY LOVE by Frauke Scheunemann (2012) ARC from House of Anansi Press, 296 pages

Carl-Leopold von Eschersbach is a 6-month-old dachshund mix ("the product of Mummy's affair with a very dashing terrier") who finds himself at the local animal shelter with a bunch of other curs where he is luckily adopted by a human who smells "like a beautiful summer's day...Very much like flowers, a bit like strawberries, with a hint of peppermint." This gorgeous-scented woman is Caroline, a violin-maker, who will turn out to need the puppy she calls Hercules more than he needs her.

After meeting Caroline's current boyfriend Thomas, Hercules wonders, "Could a love of animals be something that raises the value of a human male?" And, he begins to plot with his feline friend, Mr. Beck, a way to bring a more desirable mate into Caroline's life. When all of their matchmaking plans seem futile, Hercules begins to see the light about the only real option for Caroline, and he couldn't be more delighted for it to work out, but he needs to let the fates find their way.

Frauke Scheunemann has added another adorable voice to the growing pantheon of canine narrators that includes Virginia Woolf's FLUSH and Garth Stein's Enzo in THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN.

I AM HALF-SICK OF SHADOWS by Alan Bradley (2011) Doubleday Canada, 271 pages

Intrepid, precocious pre-adolescent chemist and sleuth Flavia de Luce returns in this caper set on her crumbling family estate, Buckshaw. In this title lifted from Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," Bradley places his protagonist in the shadows of her own home when her father rents out the property to a film crew intent on shooting "another one of those blasted country house things" in order to make ends meet for the next patch.

Peopled with familiar characters from previous books including Dogger, Col. de Luce's faithful batman from the war, and Mrs. Mullett, the cook who can't really cook, the amiable Vicar and the spectre of Flavia's mother, Harriet, slipping between the pages of the next Alan Bradley mystery feels like a visit home for the holidays, spent in the company of folks who know you the best and love you in spite of your flaws.

When the crew from Ilium Films arrives with its star Phyllis Wyvern in tow, "her complexion like cream in a summer kitchen," Flavia's older sisters Daffy and Feely are gobsmacked to be in the presence of such a luminous film idol.

When the jack-of-all-tradesman Mr. McNulty is injured on site, the production begins to unravel. A snowstorm means unexpected guests are forced to batten down at Buckshaw and tempers flare. "Bun" Keats, Phyllis Wyvern's personal assistant, takes to bed from the stress of it all, migraine-bound, and Ms. Wyvern herself keeps others awake through the night as she watches over and over again one of her hit films, until, of course, she no longer can. Flavia discovers their famous guest, dead as a doornail, choked with a swath of celluloid tied around her neck in a decorous bow from the very film that continues to "Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!...like a black bullwhip, flapping round and round."

Who killed Phyllis Wyvern and why becomes the delicious mystery that Flavia helps the inspector to solve this time.

Bradley's affection for his protagonist is clear. Only once or twice did Flavia's precocity make my smacking hand itch, but it certainly didn't deter me from enjoying the ride alongside her.

VERTICAL by Rex Pickett (2010) Loose Gravel Press, 403 pages

Irrepressible rapscallions Jack and Miles reunite seven years later in this sequel to SIDEWAYS, Pickett's beloved debut novel that found its way adapted to the screen by Alexander Payne and the recipient of 350 awards.

VERTICAL is a smart, sassy unconventional picaresque romp from California, through Oregon (where Miles has been invited to be the Emcee at a Pinot Noir bacchanal) to Wisconsin. The first-person Russian nesting doll meta-narrative of Martin inside Miles inside Rex makes my litnerd head spin. In a good way.

Lady luck has been kind to Miles in the interim. He has written a novel that was made into a wildly successful movie called SHAMELESS, while Jack is divorced from his socialite wife, has a kid he adores, but is out of work, his paw outstretched for handouts from Miles. And, though women have been hurling themselves and their potty mouths at Miles because of his celebrity on the wine circuit, Miles yearns for a relationship that delves beyond the surface, one grounded in love and respect. Jack, however, has other ideas for both of them.

Enter Phyllis, Miles's mom. She's had a stroke, is wheelchair bound, and is inching a little closer to death in the assisted living facility they jokingly call Las Villas de Muerte, where she poignantly notes, "I don't feel human anymore." Miles is determined to honor his mother's wish to see her siblings, so decides to do just that with the support of Joy--one of her caretakers--and Jack as his co-pilot of the Rampvan, sharing driving duties and drinks along the way.

The unlikely foursome is joined by a fifth, Phyllis's impetuous Yorkshire terrier who has been living with Miles' ex-girlfriend. And, though there are capers a-plenty including a dognapping, al fresco dalliances and a perfectly conceived bathetic moment in a dunk tank--all rife with Miles and Jack's trademark repartee--it is the heart at the centre of the narrative that delivers its humanity straight up. Sometimes the most difficult moments to face are the ones that will change your life for the better.

Find your way to VERTICAL. Sip your way through. Savour it like a glass of perfectly-aged Richebourg. And, discover what true friendship is all over again.

RIN TIN TIN: THE LIFE AND THE LEGEND by Susan Orlean (2011) Simon & Schuster, 317 pages

In a year of beguiling canine appearances on celluloid that include a Buster Keatonish Uggy in THE ARTIST, Skeletor in 50/50 (with those eyes like sucked caramels), and Cosmo as the existentialist Arthur in BEGINNERS, the timing is more than right for the release of Susan Orlean's exhaustive and entrancing biography of perhaps the most legendary dog of all, Rin Tin Tin.

"Rin Tin Tin was born on a battlefield in eastern France in September 1918. The exact date isn't certain, because no one who was present during the birth ever reported on it, but when Lee found the puppies on September 15, 1918, they were blind and bald and still nursing." So begins the narrative that traces the remarkable trajectory of a German shepherd and his devoted master from the Front during the Great War to the height of stardom that Hollywood could muster in the 1920s to a life on the tired circuit of promotion to stave off near bankruptcy.

And, as much as I was beguiled by Rin Tin Tin and Lee Duncan's story--a tale of two orphans--and discovered so much about dogs in service during war time, it was the beauty and strength of Orlean's prose that held me in its thrall.

Consider this, for example:

"What lasts? What lingers? What is snagged by the brambles of time, and what slips through and disappears? What leaves only a little dent in the world, the soft sunken green grave, the scribble on a scrap of paper, the memory that is bleached by time and then vanishes bit by bit each day?"

Isn't it heart-thumpingly gorgeous?

You could turn to any page in RIN TIN TIN:THE LIFE AND THE LEGEND and find passages equally moving. Do just that. Find your way to this fascinating, big-hearted gem.

THEN AGAIN by Diane Keaton (2011) Random House, 256 pages

In a book that is a genuine collaboration between Keaton and her mother Dorothy Hall in both spirit and word, THEN AGAIN will hook you from its opening gambit:

"Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she'd collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table... Mom liked to THINK about life, especially the experience of being a woman. She liked to write about it too."

And, write about it, she did. In 85 journals. Literally thousands of pages, excerpts of which are included here along with photographs of those worn pages and personal collages. Just as Dorothy Hall tried to navigate her way through marriage and motherhood and what it meant to be a woman searching for a satisfying creative outlet, so does her famous actress daughter through frank, funny and fearless examination of her own life and relationships.

Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino play supporting roles in Keaton's narrative, though what remains of Pacino is reduced to a list of fragments. Both Allen and Beatty seem genuine friends. I am certainly envious of the billet-doux she shares where Allen writes,"You remain a flower--too, too delicate for this harsh world... And I remain a weed." Or Beatty's encouragement for her to make her own film: "Stop messing around and do it. You'd do it better than anybody. You know more than anybody. Its rough edges would be fascinating....From someone who admired you at a distance last night. Who would like to get to know you better. "

Of course I delighted in the behind-the-scenes perspective of working on ANNIE HALL, THE GODFATHER and REDS, but what intrigued me most about Keaton's journey was her mindful decision to become a single parent to two children, Dexter and Duke, in her fifties. And, the book finishes with them in an open letter to her Mom about how she wishes she were standing side by side, watching her daughter and son "fly down the water slide, laughing all the way." Then again, maybe she is. They are.

A TRICK OF THE LIGHT by Louise Penny (2011) Minotaur Books

Sitting down with a Louise Penny Inspector Gamache novel is as fine as meeting your closest friends at your favourite bistro, hands wrapped around warming bowls of cafe au lait, leaning in to listen to each others' intimacies. It feels right.

For as long as Penny has been writing her mysteries, I have been reading them. All of them. Over and over again. I am as familiar with the inhabitants of sleepy Three Pines (not on any map, except in your imagination) as I am with the people in my life. I fret about Clara and Peter's marriage, cheer Ruth's every expletive, wish Gabri and Olivier were my gay BFFs and Myrna my off-the-clock shrink. All of them are familiar with heartbreak, and its accompanying room for hope. The light that sneaks in through hairline fractures and widening gaps. And, there is also the Surete du Quebec's head of homicide, the beguiling Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, who reminds me of Atticus Finch in his fairmindedness and respect for others, especially outsiders.

At the beginning of A TRICK OF THE LIGHT, Clara is about to enter the vernissage for her one-woman show at the Musee in Montreal, but she's worried that her art won't measure up to the critics and has a panic attack. Heureusement, her dear friend Olivier coaxes her, "on your knees or on your feet, you're going through that door." For those familiar with Penny's books, it's a succulent treat to see the new plot threading back through previous narratives, as shown in Clara's painting The Three Graces that she was working on in DEAD COLD. It's the one that reminds me of the Leonard Cohen lyrics "there is a crack, a crack in every thing. That's how the light gets in." Penny uses the piece to navigate through to the chiaroscuro motif that gives the new novel its title.

After schmoozing with gallery owners and agents at the vernissage, Clara hosts a party back home in Three Pines to celebrate her official launch into the art world. The morning after as she impatiently waits for Peter to bring the papers with the critical reviews, something more upsetting turns her world upside down. It seems a stranger has been murdered and dropped in her garden, her bloom a little more than off the rose. Chief Inspector Gamache and his intrepid team including Jean Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste investigate, turning over coins, clumps of earth and fraught pasts in their wake.

I kept changing my mind about the suspect. You will too once you immerse yourself in Louise Penny's beautifully crafted, emotionally satisfying book.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET by Reif Larsen (2009), Penguin Canada, 375 pages

Larsen's epigraph from Melville's MOBY DICK--"It is not down in any map; true places never are."--is a perfect touchstone for this idiosyncratic and totally engaging bildungsroman about an extraordinary boy.

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a twelve-year-old map-making Midwestern wunderkind who is invited by his mecca, the Smithsonian Institution, to deliver an address about his exceptional work. He instinctively knows that "a map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected." Of course, the man who placed the call is unaware that T.S. is only twelve, or that his journey to Washington, D.C. from Divide, Montana is a risky one, the stuff that dreams are made on.

Nothing escapes T.S.'s need to make sense of his world. Not the watershed, nor the topography of his bedroom with his Lewis and Clarke rug, nor the amplitude of the gunshot that killed his younger brother Layton, whose absence is the ongoing presence in the narrative. Layton hides beneath everything T.S. writes. Even the porch speaks to T.S. Not to mention his dog Verywell, or the Cowboy Winnebago he stows away in to make his train-hopping, hobo-like journey from the West to the East.

As you are beguiled by T.S.'s story, you will want to linger over the marginalia--sophisticated doodles, impeccable maps and wonderous ideas--that helps this memorable protagonist find his way to real belonging.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET is the sort of book that makes your heart sing about the wonder of this life. Do yourself a favour. Read it.

DARK BLOOD by Stuart MacBride (2010) Harper Collins Canada, 469 pages

When I heard Stuart MacBride on stage at an IFOA evening that featured his fellow Scottish crime fiction writers Denise Mina and Ian Rankin, I knew I'd find my way to his novels.

DARK BLOOD is my first exposure to MacBride's gritty, witty style. I have never guffawed aloud so frequently reading a crime novel as I did in response to the repartee between D.S. Logan McRae and his horny lesbian boss D.I. Steel. Their familiar patter is almost Shakespearean, putting me in mind of Benedick and Beatrice in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, more about noting than nothing.

At the outset, serial rapist Richard Knox (who fancied grandfather types) is being released, having served his time. And, it looks like now that he's found God he's deserving of a second chance to build a life anew. D.I. Steel is not so sure. She knows Knox "is an odious wee shite, and if anything goes wrong" in his reacclimatization with civilized society that she'll be "the one carrying the can." McRae is less than thrilled to be assigned to the team responsible for getting Knox settled into his Aberdeen home, or to be working with D.S.I. Danby, the one who put Knox behind bars for a decade. McRae, like his boss, believes that Knox is not a changed man. That he "didn't need an exit strategy" to protect him from the wrath of citizens who discover he's living among them. Rather, "he needed an exit wound. Preferably from a shotgun to the back of the head."

Knox isn't McRae's only headache, however. Edinburgh gangster Malk the Knife wants a slice of the mini-development boom in Aberdeen and local crime lord Hamish Mowat thinks he has McRae in his blackmailing back pocket. McRae tries to resist, but he can't help feeling dirtied by their thuggish rapport.

With subplots that feel entirely human, peopled by McRae's damaged colleagues and his accommodating girlfriend, DARK BLOOD kept me interested on many levels. And, although I'd hoped to witness retributive justice meted out on the entirely loathsome Knox, I do understand why MacBride gave him the ending that he did. Life is messy. It doesn't come with a guarantee for a satisfying conclusion. Plus, Knox is a sociopath, one who could give "a seven-year masterclass in how to get away with murder."

Because of the crafty, clever way MacBride tells a story, I'll be reading my way through all of his books featuring D.S. Logan McRae.

THE UNCOUPLING by Meg Wolitzer (2011) Riverhead Books, 271 pages

In the Fall during the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto a savvy editor (who works for a different publishing house) recommended Meg Wolitzer's books to me and I finally made my way to her most recent one THE UNCOUPLING during the Christmas holidays.

A social satirist with the aplomb of Richard Ford, Wolitzer enchanted me from her opening sentence: "People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness." Right? Right.

Enter Fran Heller, a new drama teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt H.S. in small-town New Jersey, a woman with the balls to select LYSISTRATA (the Aristophanes comedy in which women stop having sex with men in order to end a war) as the school play. Curiously, a spell seems to be cast over the women in the school, including Dory Lang, a happily married Literature teacher who is abruptly disinterested in sharing a bed with her longtime spouse Robby with whom she previously slept "together frequently, happily, and not just gently, but with the same gruff, fierce purpose as always."

Not only does Wolitzer satirize small town life and the politics of high school as convincingly as Tom Perrotta did in ELECTION, but she also shines the light on the inarticulate, hormonal messiness of adolescence through the actions of Dory and Robby's daughter Willa and Fran's son Eli, "their mouths having not yet opened onto the hot surprise of other mouths, their bodies still unfolded and unrevealed."

When Marissa Clayborn, the talented, gorgeous lead in LYSISTRATA literally takes to her bed in public protest, Fran Heller casts smart, shy chorus member Willa in her place, a decision that has both intended and unintended consequences.

Like the fictional reviewer of the Eleanor Roosevelt H.S. production of Aristophanes' comedy who praises Willa's "heady and almost breathless" performance as Lysistrata, I suggest that Meg Wolitzer is a novelist "who compels us with her urgency, integrity and beauty" in THE UNCOUPLING.

THE END OF THE WASP SEASON by Denise Mina (2011) McArthur & Company, 404 pages

Denise Mina is a whip-smart lawyer-turned-crime-fiction-writer, and one of the finest of the genre. In THE END OF THE WASP SEASON, her eighth novel, millionaire Lars Anderson completes suicide by hanging himself from the oak tree on his sprawling Kent estate. Nobody seems at all upset by his death, including his wife and teenaged children. It's a bit of a relief to them all, truth be told, to be rid of the right bastard, who wrote in his final note to his wife, "I was a great husband. And in return you sucked the fucking life out of me. You fucking wizened bitch. I hope you're happy." And, no, he was not a great husband, as soon becomes clear. Nor was he much of a father to Thomas and Ella or to his secret second family shacked up in London, either.

What is more upsetting, however, is the apparently random murder of a young Glaswegian woman, Sarah Erroll, home to take care of the business following her own mother's death. She is bludgeoned by her young killers on the stairs as she tries to make her escape, wearing only a t-shirt--a source of embarrassment to the investigating officers who find her corpse indelicately sprawled.

DS Alex Morrow, pregnant with twins, and harboring secrets of her own, becomes the lead investigator in this case that points to a former classmate's sons and forces her to contemplate the nature of family and loyalty.

Through intelligent, character-driven twists and turns, Mina's multi-layered narrative reminds me stylistically of Kate Atkinson's CASE HISTORIES or STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG. I hope they'd both be chuffed to be in each other's storytelling company.

EASY TO LIKE by Edward Riche (2011) House of Anansi, 293 pages

I enjoyed the warp and wit of Riche's first novel RARE BIRDS, so was pleased to receive EASY TO LIKE which promised a satire of a C-list Hollywood screenwriter Elliot Johnson whose true vocation is becoming a beloved vintner, wine snob that he is. However, like Icarus, Elliot swoops too close to the sun (in his case an influential producer whose wife he refuses to bed), and, although not plummeting to his own death off the California coast, is banished to become a tony bureaucrat in, of all places, Toronto, where he is hired to be in charge of English television programming for the mothership, the CBC.

Although I was mildly interested in the vineyard details and the business of running one that produced a wine that is more than "easy to like," I found the satire skewering the national broadcaster mostly mean-spirited.

What began as a vaguely amusing, watery episode of ENTOURAGE with empty-headed, silicon-breasted femmebots who tweak their own nipples (and, no, I'm not making this up) turned into a ridiculous parody of entertainment programming that included a pitch for LES LES starring "Sri Lankan and South Korean dykes." Oh, and don't forget that his ex-wife leaves Elliot for their Hispanic housekeeper, their former child star son is serving time in prison and there's a zebra escaped from San Simeon, nibbling Elliot's best grapes. I haven't even told you about the worst scenes, involving sex "with crooked arthritic claws," the former t.v. host-turned-hermit living in the Rosedale Valley Ravine, or the rich man's fatal ass-over-teakettle fall from the balcony of the Park Hyatt.

Ironically, EASY TO LIKE was not easy to like. Though, with reference to Vaucluse and Chateaunneuf-du-Papes labels, it did remind me of a splendid holiday touring through the wine caves in the south of France. Riche also used two of my favourite words--"chuffed" and "petrichor--" and raised the specter of the Amazing Kreskin. Remember him?

SAY HER NAME by Francisco Goldman (2011) Grove Atlantic, 350 pages

I heard Francisco Goldman interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel during the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto and was impressed by his candor. He not only spoke openly about his vulnerability after the accidental death of his wife Aura two years after they married, but also about how writing this book because of its rawness helped him to face the blame that he continues to shoulder.

Judge this book by its cover as he invited us to do that afternoon. It is a photo of Aura's wedding dress, the same dress that he believed filled with her spirit as it kept him company while he wrote this mesmerizing novel.

What strikes me about SAY HER NAME, and it will you, as well, is how Goldman toys with the form of a memoir, encouraging each reader to reveal their shared experiences together, layer by layer. Like Michael Ondaatje, who similarly plays with the form in his recent and most accessible novel THE CAT'S TABLE, Goldman is winking a little here, dear reader. Yes, there are intimacies that actually occurred between him and his whip-smart, sexy young wife, but he has also used tools of the novelist's trade and imposed a narrative arc that is largely absent from life, to make your experience all the more satisfying.

Read SAY HER NAME, the novel Colm Toibin calls, "a beautiful love story, and an extraordinary story of loss." It is winsomely both.

JACQUOT & THE FIFTEEN by Martin O'Brien (2007) Headline, 532 pages

Set in France, Martin O'Brien's JACQUOT books are as much clever crime fiction as they are brilliant armchair travel through Paris, Provence and the Cote d'Azur.

At the outset, Chief Inspector Daniel Jacquot is just one of the boys at a reunion bash for his fellow rugby teammates hosted by their billionaire coach Pierre Dombasle at his opulent residence in the South of France. When one of the middle-aged lads appears to have committed suicide in the stables, however, Jacquot switches immediately into investigative mode, not trusting the casual attitude of the local constabulary.

There are soon other suspicious deaths as well: in a sex club, on a curving stretch of road, and in the comfort of a home. The coincidence is too much for Jacquot and he becomes driven to solve each apparently linked crime.

O'Brien knows about pacing. He could teach a master class in it, to be sure. With each whip-smart plot turn and new assumption, he'll have you flipping the pages of JACQUOT & THE FIFTEEN right through to its surprising and satisfying end.

ALICE BLISS by Laura Harrington (2011) Viking Penguin, 306 pages

Alice Bliss is fourteen and will experience a lot of firsts in the next year: she'll learn how to drive, she'll feel the blush of first love, she'll manage to nurture a garden on her own, and she'll figure out how to survive her father's deployment in Iraq where he is so many thousands of miles from home.

With experience I've had facilitating children's groups for Bereaved Families of Ontario, I know both Alice and her younger sister Ellie's behaviour to ring true. Alice wears her dad Matt's shirt to feel closer to him, a continuing bond. She's furious when her mom launders the shirt, because now it won't smell at all like her dad's unique blend of "Sawdust. Wood smoke...Aftershave. Linseed oil." There is also the need for these girls to protect the surviving parent from further hurt as the children often become the caretakers when the dynamic shifts.

Before his departure, Matt is pragmatic. He shows Alice an envelope with "some important numbers. The VA so you can get benefits, my lawyer, my life insurance" and assures her that this information is "like carrying an umbrella in case it rains, and then it doesn't rain." This gesture reminded me of these frank lines from Frances Richey's poem "Inventory" about her son serving in Iraq:

Officer Record Brief
Hazardous Duty Orders
Zero Your Weapon

He’s given me his dog-eared copy of Komunyakaa’s
“Neon Vernacular,” underlined:
“We can transplant broken hearts/
but can we put goodness back into them?”

Life Insurance: to be split between Mom and Dad
Emergency Records ... who gets called
battalion wants to know what to read
at your funeral, what songs to play

He looks up from the paperwork,
hard into my eyes:
“You said you wanted to know.”

Now, Alice does not want to know the details that Matt offers up, but she needs to know, especially later when she searches her memories for guidance about what to do when it becomes clear that she and her mom and her sister must accommodate Matt's loss in their lives. As they launch their fragile flotilla to commemorate him, Alice realizes, that like any life, they are mutable: "just for a moment, a moment longer. Here. And then gone."

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes (2011) Random House of Canada, 150 pages

After reading an excerpt from this year's Man Booker Prize winner in my Grade 12 Writer's Craft class a week ago, one of the boys bought a copy, read it in a gulp or two and loaned it to me yesterday. Like him, I flipped through this little tome on my travels to the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto last night and finished it on my commute to work today.

Before school this morning we had a little conversation about our sense of the ending, which neither of us had anticipated, in its soap opera-ish reveal. Like the protagonist Tony Webster, both Ben and I felt our outsider status because we "didn't quite get it"--entirely Barnes' point, I venture to guess. It took the kindness of a stranger in Tony's life to set him (and us, by extension) straight about the mutable facts of his past.

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING explores the unreliability of memory, its essential fickleness. And, although, I didn't really love this novel, Barnes has me flipping back through the pages, as if it were a mystery to be solved from clues I clearly missed.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT IN THE WORKHOUSE by Diana Athill (2011) House of Anansi Press, 196 pages

In her preface to this collection of previously published stories, 93-year-old Diana Athill writes about "being hit" by her first story "one January morning in 1958." And, that in terms of her writing process, "I did not think about them in advance: a feeling would brew up, a first sentence would occur to me, and then the story would come, as though it had been there all the time." Consider the first sentence in "The Real Thing:" "I went to the dance with Thomas Toofat." Already you know something about the narrator and her attitudes. Or the one from "The Return" where she begins, "'Is bombs from the mountain. Not good,' said the man Christos, scraggy at the table over his plate of beans and oil, and wiped his fist across his mouth." It was this story that won a 500-pound prize from The Observer and woke her up to the fact that she "could write and had become happy."

The seductive quality of Athill's stories makes them feel contemporary, even though most of them were scribbled into existence 40-50 years ago. I knew she was a woman ahead of her time from reading her memoirs STET and SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END, so I should have expected the same progressive attitudes from characters in the stories collected here in MIDSUMMER NIGHT IN THE WORKHOUSE. She writes so convincingly about the distances between men and women and with a wry sense of humour. Take, for example, Cecilia's observation about Charles in the titular tale: "He went straight over to take off the record, assuming that she would prefer him to music." Or, the way she boldly teases him by suggesting, "Please do not sleep with the maids. It can cause pregnancy."

The stories are also rife with ordinary moments that stop your heart as in "For Rain It Hath a Friendly Sound" when Kate returns with her lover David for a last drink and "halfway up the stairs, he turned in the middle of a sentence to kiss her cheek...almost too natural to notice." Later, in "An Unavoidable Delay" Rose decides that "to go on with this architect would be worse than full skirts, flowered cotton and flat sandals, it would be too banal, not to be thought of."

Diana Athill is a wonder. Find your way to these stories. You will be charmed.

THE ANTAGONIST by Lynn Coady (2011) House of Anansi Press, 337 pages

"There will be time to murder and create." ~T.S. Eliot

Any writer who has the balls to begin their narrative with a T.S. Eliot reference has my attention. Unsurprisingly, Lynn Coady's protagonist Gordon "Rank" Rankin is a scrapper by nature and avocation when he's on the ice, a hockey enforcer, a beloved goon. Just like his old man, Gordon Senior, he's quick to flare. Until tragedy swipes by, that is, and makes a meal of Rank. It changes everything as Rank tries to disappear from university life and the hope of his east coast town.

Twenty years later Rank discovers that Adam, one of his closest university friends, has used the details of Rank's life to write a novel and THE ANTAGONIST forms Rank's impassioned response to that book in a series of emails in which he deconstructs their shared past as well as comes to terms with the sadness in his own.

Rank's voice is confident, clear and convincingly male. And, by the time you've made his journey with him, peering pruriently over his shoulder, you'll understand his apparently paradoxical apology/accusation at the end:

"And thank you for not putting it in your book.
And fuck you for not putting it in your book.
Your friend,
Gordon Rankin"

Lynn Coady is a real talent, one whose words I'll be watching for eagerly.

THE VIRGIN CURE by Ami McKay (2011) From the A.A. Knopf Canada ARC, 351 pages

Ami McKay's debut novel THE BIRTH HOUSE was a national bestseller and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award. Her second book THE VIRGIN CURE has been eagerly anticipated, and with good reason.

Set in the 1870s in Manhattan, McKay unravels the tale of Moth Fenwick--the daughter of a Gypsy fortune-teller who sells her into service to the sadistic Mrs. Wentworth when she's only twelve. Before then Moth runs through tenements with local hooligans, whose "names were made from body parts and scars, bragging rights and bad luck." In order to escape to a better life beyond the abusive walls of the posh Wentworth home, Moth forges an allegiance with the butler, Nestor, who offers a kindness that "would require everything I had to give."

Moth does escape, but ends up being lured into an altogether different form of service as a whore in a brothel run by Miss Everett, who provides girls who might offer her incurable and tainted gentleman clients not only companionship, but also "the virgin cure." The one good piece of luck that befalls Moth at "The Infant School" is meeting Dr. Sadie, a progressive physician who has a social conscience and tends to the prostitutes and the poor in the Bowery. Dr. Sadie is the moral heart of the novel and based on McKay's own great-great-grandmother who wrote her graduating thesis on syphilis and the deadly myth that a gentleman with the disease could cleanse his blood by deflowering a virgin.

Interspersed with diary entries, advertisements, newspaper articles and period quotations (from songs, books and poems) that lend an enhanced authenticity to the narrative, THE VIRGIN CURE is a rapturous tale told from the perspective of a survivor who makes an indelible impression in your heart.

GLASS BOYS by Nicole Lundrigan (2011) Douglas &McIntyre

Douglas & McIntyre, the little west-coast publisher that could, does not shy away from tough topics. Earlier this year they published Margaux Fragoso's harrowing memoir TIGER, TIGER, where she chronicles her relationship with a pedophile and through her exquisite pain gives that life full resonant voice in the telling. Nicole Lundrigan's novel GLASS BOYS is calibrated with similar intensity and rendered tenable through unflinching visceral prose.

All families have secrets, hidden away in dark places. None, however, are perhaps as upsetting as the one coveted by eleven-year-old Garrett Glass. When Garrett's stepfather Eli Fagan discovers the contents of his prized pickle jar, he flies into a blind rage, burning the evidence in a backyard fire-barrel.

At the same time, the Trench brothers, Roy and Lewis stumble drunkenly into Fagan's yard and their misstep ends up costing Roy his life. Faced with his own guilt at not being able to save or protect his brother as you would expect a local cop to do, Lewis stokes a life-long hatred against Fagan, the man he holds responsible for Roy's unexpected death. For a time Lewis hopes for a different, more loving future in a life that he builds with Wilda Burry and their two sons. However, when previous darknesses begin to haunt his family and cleave them apart, Lewis realizes that the past is not past. And, all roads, both literal and symbolic, lead back to Eli Fagan's place.

Nicole Lundrigan's GLASS BOYS is paradoxically dark and illuminating. Her strong prose reminds me of Michael Helm's, especially in CITIES OF REFUGE and IN THE PLACE OF LAST THINGS: the way they both unravel a tale about flawed characters is utterly riveting.

THE LITTLE SHADOWS by Marina Endicott (2011) Doubleday Canada, 541 pages

Marina Endicott's debut novel, GOOD TO A FAULT, garnered my reader loyalty as well as a Giller Prize shortlist nod for her a few years ago. So, I was delighted to receive the ARC of her forthcoming book THE LITTLE SHADOWS, a story grounded in the fantastically rich world of vaudeville in the early years of the 20th century.

After the unexpected death of their father, the Avery sisters, Aurora (16), Clover (14) and Bella (13) take to the footlights to earn a living as a singing trio under the tutelage of their mother, a former vaudeville darling. They share stages with magicians, animal wranglers, and tired comedians across Canada and the United States from 1912 through 1917 always hoping that a future booking will provide them the independent financial security they crave.

Of course there are love affairs that each girl needs to navigate, in the wings and on stage, some of which are genuine and others that are relationships of convenience and cruelty.

Endicott's extraordinary attention to period detail will astonish as you become immersed in the lives and preoccupations of the Avery sisters as they come to realize the essence of a vaudeville life, "dancing, singing, dying, that is all of it."

This year's Giller Prize jury--Andrew O'Hagan, Annabel Lyon and Howard Norman--have plucked THE LITTLE SHADOWS out of the 150+ titles submitted for consideration and given it a place on their longlist alongside Michael Ondaatje and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Because of the grace with which the narrative unfolds I have every expectation to see Endicott's name make the shortlist as well.