Peter Oliva0.0 Alive with history, myth, and wonder, The City of Yes is a luminous novel of parallel journeys through old and present-day Japan. In Saitama to teach English, the narrator is confronted by unlikely visions of home as he gradually enters the world of contemporary Japan, with its floating stories, enigmas, and contradictions. His own story is deftly interwoven with that of a real-life nineteenth-century Canadian adventurer, whose strange confinement in a Japanese prison, beginning in 1848, is so vividly imagined by the narrator. Full of delightful tales and eccentric characters, and written with the delicacy of a brushstroke artist, The City of Yes is suffused with warm humour, and with the intelligence and curiosity of a keen observer of life’s riches and eccentricities.
Кэролайн Аддерсон0.0 Malcolm Firth is an aging hairdresser whose partner, Denis, is wasting away from memory loss. Malcolm works at a zany Vancouver hair salon where he trains Alison, a young ingenue from the suburbs, amidst a staff of eccentric urbanoid hair stylists. Their clients include a troop of old people, one of whom is a Holocaust survivor. It is this old woman who provides innocent Alison with her first glimpse into the depredations of the human race. When one of Alison's gay friends is brutally murdered by skinheads, she is soon propelled on a harrowing journey of sorrow and the getting of wisdom. Haunted by the death of her friend, she wanders the rings of a psychological and spiritual inferno, bringing the slowly dissipating Malcolm with her. Her obsession takes them to post-communist Poland where they struggle to reconstitute the past in the killing grounds of Auschwitz. How do we remember our history? Why are the same cruelties repeated through time? These are the urgent questions that underpin this powerful first novel from one of Canada's most emotionally daring young writers. Rich in its emotional ground, beautifully pitched, and written in a refined and assured prose style, A History of Forgetting is a most compelling book. Caroline Adderson is a virtuoso conjurer of the human condition. (1999)
Elyse Gascó0.0 From this funny, wise, and fresh new voice comes a collection of eight stories about adoption and birth, parents and children
The Real True Story is a powerful, poignant collection of thematically interwoven stories about relationships between parents and children, especially mothers and daughters. Each story explores the complex and often volatile terrain of adoption and birth. We meet young adopted women who yearn for the sense of family that blood ties bring, and mothers who struggle with the decision to give their babies up. A grown woman who was adopted tries to imagine her birth mother's life, a young girl is abducted by her father and shares a series of strange adventures with him, a teenage mother plans to give up her newborn, a pregnant wife considers abortion. Edgy, urban, bold and vibrant, The Real True Story marks the emergence of a young writer who understands the human heart and the secret lives of ordinary people.
Judy MacDonald0.0 Provocative, suspenseful, and dangerously sensual, Jane tells the story of a young woman's need to be loved, her wish to be wanted. Perplexed by a world that treats her as an outsider?a girl with foolish, impudent desires?she becomes that girl, using her youth and sexuality to attract and repel. Yearning to be older, to be an adult, she dances at the fringes of power and control in her relationship, ultimately testing notions of perpetrator and victim. Often frightening in its powerful mixture of fantasy and reality, "Jane" skillfully documents the impressionability of a young woman, and flirts with alternate interpretations of sexuality and desire in a difficult, complicated age. "Jane" is a unique co-publication with The Mercury Press of Toronto. Shortlisted, Rogers Communications Writer's Trust Prize for Fiction
Alistair Macleod4.0 Alistair MacLeod musters all of the skill and grace that have won him an international following to give us No Great Mischief, the story of a fiercely loyal family and the tradition that drives it. Generations after their forebears went into exile, the MacDonalds still face seemingly unmitigated hardships and cruelties of life. Alexander, orphaned as a child by a horrific tragedy, has nevertheless gained some success in the world. Even his older brother, Calum, a nearly destitute alcoholic living on Toronto's skid row, has been scarred by another tragedy. But, like all his clansman, Alexander is sustained by a family history that seems to run through his veins. And through these lovingly recounted stories-wildly comic or heartbreakingly tragic-we discover the hope against hope upon which every family must sometimes rely.
