Road to Thunder Hill

Road to Thunder Hill by Connie Barnes Rose

Inanna  Publications, $22.95

Trish’s life is a little out of control.  She is in her forties and feeling it.  Her marriage to Ray has taken a turn for the worse and he has moved out, leaving Thunder Hill to work in the salt mines in Newville.

Trish stays up late, drinks too much and watches her life spiraling downward, feeling powerless to intervene.  And it’s not just her relationship with her husband that is failing.  Trish’s connection with her teenage daughter is mired in arguments and petty sniping, and to make matters much worse, a pretender has arrived in the family.  Olive claims to be her half-sister, her father’s daughter, a premise Trish rejects completely.  Trish believes Olive is an imposter whose primary goal in life is to irritate and annoy her.  While she struggles with her faltering relationships, Olive is a particular thorn in her side, a position not shared by the rest of her family.  “When it comes to Olive, my mother’s take is that since she’s here and might very well be my actual half sister, I should try to be friendly.  This always gets my back up.”

Connie Barnes Rose’s first book was a series of linked short stories and some of her earlier characters have found their way into her new novel.  Road to Thunder Hill has been a while in the writing.  “I wrote the bones of it over two or three years,” she said in a phone interview from Montreal, “It comes slowly. It’s hard when one has a job to establish a process for writing a novel and keep it up.  I teach creative writing and the teaching life is not a writer’s life.  It’s not at all the same. I spend time on my students’ work, reading and critiquing their writing.  It’s not always easy to refocus and find time for my own work.” 

However, Road to Thunder Hill was worth waiting for. Rose has created a host of likeable, eccentric characters whose destinies are inextricably intertwined.  They live in a small fictional farming community in Nova Scotia and like any small town, there is no privacy.  Lives are grist for the gossip mill, however kindly meant. 

Rose’s characters are real and touchable.  Her easy writing style creates an intimacy with her readers which pulls us straight into the pages. Her people look out for each other and take the time to make sure their neighbours are getting by, which happily gives an opportunity to keep tabs on what’s happening outside their own homes. 

A freak snow storm hits the town, cutting out power lines and isolating pockets of the community.  A wild evening in the local pub ends with Trish sleeping on a pool table in the arms of Bear James, the local hermit and Ray’s best friend.  Not that anything happens, mind, but community being what it is, next day the incident begins its escalation into legend as folk find their way to Olive’s kitchen to weather out the storm and its aftermath.

Stranded at her alleged half-sister’s house, Trish teeters on an emotional edge between chaos borne of insecurity and petty jealousy, and a wisdom of which she is only vaguely aware, one which comes from age and experience.  “It struck me how completely out of control my life had become.” 

“Trish is a new character in this book,” says Rose, “She might reflect parts of me or bits of others but she has truly become a character in her own right.  I see her as a woman in ‘identity crisis distress’.  It’s what many women go through when their children leave home and change is inevitable. Trish is struggling with who she is becoming.”

Road to Thunder Hill is a novel about change and letting go, so life can move on and love can find a way to bring joy and life back to our hearts.  Rose may have taken longer than she wanted to bring this novel to fruition, but it was worth waiting for.

 

Connie Barnes Rose grew up in Amherst, Nova Scotia. She is the author of an acclaimed short story collection and now lives and works in Montreal where she teaches creative writing at Concordia University and the Quebec Writers Federation.

A Cold Night for Alligators

 by Nick Crowe ~ Knopf Canada

   ~ Review: Halifax Herald, April 17, 2011

Jasper is twenty-something, working for an insurance company and living in the suburbs of Toronto.   His brother, Coleman, was odd throughout their childhood, worryingly obsessed about building what he truly believed would be a working space ship in the back yard.  His affinity for alligators is not yet seen as a problem.

After a family incident (involving the space ship), Coleman walks out the back gate and never returns. Every effort to find him turns up nothing, but every birthday Jasper gets a call with silence on the other end.

One evening, while waiting for the subway, Jasper is pushed in the path of an oncoming train by a random act of violence. After seven months in a coma, he surfaces to find his girl friend has moved on, his job has evaporated and he has a lot of time on his hands.  He comes to the stunning realization that his life so far is a life half lived. 

His birthday comes once again, along with the annual silent phone call.  But this year Jasper is able to identify the area code and with his ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend and the perpetually drunk Duane, he gasses up and hits the road, heading for Sanibel, Florida. Alligator country!

A Cold Night for Alligators is a road trip before it becomes a family saga after it becomes a mystery.  It is loaded with quirky, funny characters, some endearing, some not so much. Crowe’s people don’t mince words or have fancy ways. They hit life with gusto, dealing with the fallout as incidental irritations. Threaded through the humour of Crowe’s writing is an undercurrent of mystery, of family secrets unresolved with Coleman right in the middle.  What really did happen in the everglades all those years ago?  A Cold Night for Alligators becomes a page turner with an ending that is very hard to see coming!

Nick Crowe has worked as a paperboy, dishwasher, psychiatric hospital janitor, laundry worker and guitar player before starting a career in television.  He lives in Toronto.

Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa ~ Knopf Canada

   ~ Review: Halifax Herald, April 17, 2011

There is a quality to Jamie Zeppa’s writing that aims directly at the reader.  Her characters speak their hearts in a way that makes Every Time We Say Goodbye read a little like a memoir as it follows the story of the Turners, a complicated family living in Sault Ste. Marie.

Dawn and her brother Jimmy live with their grandparents, but their lives are changing. Their father and his new wife are finally coming for them, and Dawn absolutely and positively knows that this is Day One of her new beginning.  Dreams do come true.  Without a backward glance, she and her brother Jimmy drive off to become, in Dawn’s mind, the quintessential fairy tale family.  But Dawn’s faith is a little shaken when it is takes longer than she anticipated, and after three months “it could still be considered the beginning.”  She makes allowances.  “Some beginnings (take) longer than others. It varied.”

Every Time We Say Goodbye moves through three generations of Turners, linking their lives, deceptions, dreams and mysteries. It pivots around Dawn’s father, Dean, the adopted son of Vera and Frank. It is the adoption that creates the underlying mystery of Zeppa’s novel.  These are times when adoption was kept secret, unwanted pregnancies hidden and saving face to the neighbours was paramount. 

Zeppa manages the shifting timelines seemingly without effort.  The Turner’s story shifts between families and generations, a style that is sometimes difficult to pull off without jarring the reader. But Zeppa’s narrative flows, linking her characters and their stories as we are pulled deep into their lives, always pleased to pick up their story once again.

Zeppa took a long time to produce her first novel, almost 10 years.  Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait that long for her next one.

Jamie Zeppa teaches English at Seneca College.  She won the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award for Adventure Travel Writing and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for Memoir. This is her first novel.

Touch

by Alexi Zetner ~ Knopf Canada

   Review: Halifax Herald, April 17, 2011

Touch is set in the fictional village of Sawgamet, BC, a logging and mining area where the winters are so cold that one year the snow was piled three stories high until July. The ensuring melt caused a runoff akin to a small tsunami. So goes the legend!

Stephen has returned home to be with his dying mother.  He is beset by memories of his childhood, and while he is often the narrator, the story reaches back to his grandfather, Jeannot, who found gold and sparked a gold rush in the northern frontier town.

A terrible accident on the melting river kills Stephen’s father and sister, and the image of them frozen in ice, hands reaching toward each other, floats through the novel, visually eerie and yet strangely comforting.  “Even through the plate of frozen river covering them, we saw clearly that little more than the width of an ax blade separated my father’s two hands from my sister’s one.”

A profound sense of cold pervades Zentner’s novel. The timelines are fluid as he weaves his story through the generations and his intense narrative style breathes life into the startling lives of the townspeople as they struggle to survive the harsh northern winters.  Drifting around the edges of the story are spirits and golden caribou, magic realism born of the north and integrated into the culture of the frontier towns and villages. Touch is a terrific story by a talented new Canadian writer.

Alexi Zentner’s short stories have been published in magazines, journals and anthologies.  Touch is his first novel and will be published internationally as well as in North America. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, he now lives in Ithaca, New York.

Your Voice in my Head

by Emma Forrest ~ Random House Canada

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, March 2011

Emma Forrest began writing a column for the (UK) Sunday Times at the precocious age of 16.  At 21, she was writing for The Guardian.  She published her first novel at 22, moved to New York and fell in love with a movie star she calls GH, her Gypsy Husband.  The world was at her feet.

But the reality of Forrest’s life was far from idyllic. She was sinking deep into mental illness and one day she realized that “her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity, past the warm waters of weird to those cold, deep patches of sea where people lose their lives.”  Bulimia and cutting were her way to feel, to bring her back to the present and she slid into a spiral of destruction and self hate that almost claimed her life.

Forrest was lucky.  She found Dr. R, a psychiatrist of enormous compassion and wisdom, “a man who though I never saw him outside one small room, believed that life is vast and worth living.”  He is the voice in her head, her connection to sanity.

As Forrest fights to gain solid ground, her perspective begins to shift.  The men who had loved and left her – GH, Dr. R. “... were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom.”

Forrest’s writing has a flavour of Lara Jefferson’s compelling memoir, These are my Sisters. Jefferson was committed to a mid-west insane asylum in the early 50's and decided that her way back to the world was to write her way sane.  She was successful.

Forrest’s memoir is equally compelling.  In spite of the craziness of the places she fights to rise above, her writing is witty and cool.  Actually, Forrest is cool, and even in her darkest days she manages to keep an engaging humour in her prose as she writes her way back from the edge.

Emma Forrest has been writing since she was a child.  She is a columnist, the author of four books and a successful screenwriter. She lives in LA.

The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb ~ Doubleday Canada

   ~ Review: Halifax Herald, February 2011

Maggie Ly realizes early in her life that a career in art does not need to be defined by her lack of talent.  She becomes a curator and seizes an opportunity to return to Vietnam to catalogue a collection of art which somehow survived the war in a bomb shelter.  She has her own agenda - to look for her father, a dissident artist who vanished after the fall of Saigon. 

Her search leads her to Hung, an elderly itinerant cook whose pho is legendary, and it is Hung’s story that is the heart of Camilla Gibb’s new novel.  Hung has made pho at his street cart for decades, moving from place to place, creating a daily challenge for his dedicated customers who continue seek him out, chopsticks and bowl in hand.

Through years of poverty, war and hardship, Hung has endured, changing little as the city changed around him.  In the years since the war, Hanoi has become modern, bustling tourist city brimming with energy and youth.

The importance of family and community flows through Gibbs’s novel, with the elderly Hung holding the threads which gently bind the characters to each other.  They embrace Maggie, sympathizing with her need to find the truth, to understand her beginnings so she can finally feel that she belongs.  “She had always felt herself [to be] an alien to some degree ...you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place ... your roots are buried in some faraway earth.” 

Camilla Gibb is a winner of the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction.  The jury of the Orange Prize listed her as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.  She lives in Toronto.

I Am a Japanese Writer

by Dany Laferrière ~ Douglas & McIntyre

  Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011

I Am a Japanese Writer is a book about a writer who pitches a title to his publisher, takes the publisher’s advance and immediately develops writer’s block as he contemplates actually writing the book. While he waits for it to pass, he decides he must understand a little of Japanese culture.

Trolling the city for insights, he finds the self-obsessed Midori and her hangers-on, who are immersed in the decadent, ‘uber-cool’ subcultures of fashion and drugs. They amuse him. He reads haiku master Basho on the subway. He is transported. He begins to believe his artifice.  “... when I became a writer and people asked me, ‘Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer?’ I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality.  Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer.” 

When the writer announces this in a mall, the results are astounding.  The book becomes a cult phenomenon and he is suddenly an international celebrity.  He is now famous for a book not yet written. Without reality, it exists because the writer is celebrated for it and therefore it no longer matters whether or not it exists, because it has taken off and, in the words of Tom Waites, he’s “Big in Japan”, which clearly raises the question of who makes art!

Translated from French by David Homel.

Dany Laferrière was born in Haiti and immigrated to Canada in 1978.  He is the author of twenty novels, and has won several awards, including the Prix Medicis for his semi-autobiographical novel, L'Enigme du retour (The Enigma of the Return).  His first children’s book, Je suis fou de Vava, won the Governor General’s award in 2006.  He lives in Montreal.

Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas ~ Thomas Allen & Son

  Review: Halifax Herald January 2011

           

Meg is a writer, just managing to get by writing book reviews and ghost writing genre fiction for adolescents, which nets her just enough cash to buy groceries and keep her damp basement apartment slightly above freezing.

Her moody, jealous boyfriend seems oblivious to the ever rising damp and Meg’s efforts to jolly him out of his funks are met with indifference at best.  It is hard to understand what Meg sees in this sad-sack boyfriend, and when she finally makes a break for freedom from both him and the damp-infested apartment, Thomas’s reader will be thankful and slightly puzzled as to what took her so long.

A book mysteriously arrives in the mail, The Science of Living Forever, a pseudo-scientific book

about the end of time.  The very idea stops Meg in her tracks. Instead of dismissing the content as pop-psyche at best, Meg is pulled into the book’s premise.  Her‘proper’ novel morphs into a ‘storyless’ story, untidy and plot-less.

Our Tragic Universe is brimming with existential energy and philosophical debates as Meg struggles to extricate herself from her marginal existence.  Once again, Thomas explores relationships and the human condition, but these explorations are tempered by the application of the ‘storyless’ story, which does mean that the plot (or non-plot) takes place primarily in the debates of the characters.  Our Tragic Universe meanders, as was Thomas’s intention.  However, the wit and nuance of her writing hold it together, making Meg’s story sympathetic and compelling.

Scarlett Thomas is a teacher, award-winning novelist and book reviewer. In 2002, she was listed as one of the twenty best young British writers.  She teaches at the University of Kent in the UK where she specializes in the contemporary novel and narrative theory and practice.

Skin Room

by Sara Tilley ~ Pedlar Press

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, May 2009

More and more, Canada is producing exciting new writers who present the Canadian culture and landscape in ways that are as different and unique as the individuals who write them. With the publication of Skin Room, we can add another writer to the list.  Sara Tilley shows us a north that is “white and flat and goes on forever”, a dream-scape of white and snow. I talked with her earlier this week when she was in Halifax for Atlantic Ink: TheWriters’ Festival.  Skin Room was shortlisted for the Thomas Raddall Prize for Fiction, an excellent achievement for a first novel.

                       

Like her fictional character, Tilley’s family moved to Sanikiluaq, NWT, when she was in early grade school.  Like Theresa, she is pale, white, and there is no way she can slip unnoticed into a class of bronze, black haired Inuit children. “It was a difficult book to write,” said Tilley.  “The north was a buried subject for me after we left and no-one talked about it. It was hard, living in the north.  I was a supersensitive kid in a class of Inuit teenagers who didn’t want me there.  My brother was younger so he slipped under the radar, but I stuck out.  I was an easy target.”

Tilley started working on Skin Room in 2001, writing in bits and pieces. At Banff in 2003, she ‘started going at it hard’. Twenty-three drafts and four years later, it was done!  “It was a very intense time,” she says.  “Theresa is a strong character, damaged but strong, and she kept teaching me things I needed to know.  While her view of the world is not mine, I learned from her.  Her voice wrote itself and it kept me going.”  

Tilley captures the awe of a pre-adolescent girl who is captivated by the northern landscapes, the geography, and who falls deeply and silently in love with Willassie Ippaq, the boy who flicks a pencil at her on her first day, resulting in several stitches in her face. Willassie is a schoolboy, a bully and a sculptor who can “look at a stone and see an animal living inside.”  Theresa yearns and loves with a childish simplicity that fully understands the impossibility of the cultural chasm, and an internal sophistication that allows her to hold that love for years after she leaves the north.

Skin Room alternates between the older Theresa who lives in St John’s, and her younger self.  Tilley has managed the timelines perfectly. Both realities feel real and immediate. The adult Theresa continues the internal intensity of her connection to the north, mourning as Willassie fades.  “... you’ve slipped too far into the past and I don’t have the skill to bring you back.”

“When I was in theatre school at York University, I did a project about problems in our childhoods,” says Tilley. “When my teacher asked how my voice felt, I told her sometimes it feels like there’s a fist in my throat.  She encouraged me to write my memories, to get out things that had not been discussed.  Once I started, the character took over and I understood that the story was about someone whose memories are still affecting their life a decade later.”

As a reader, there can be anxious moments when we are unable to know where the writer is going, willing them not to cross that line into cultural appropriation.  “I worried about that,” says Tilley, “about taking ownership of something that is not mine.  But I write from a child’s point of view, as a white child in an alien culture. I grew up there, it was my home and I still connect with the landscape.  It’s the landscape I think about.”

Her next novel is also set in the north, Alaska this time. She received an inheritance of letters from her great-grandfather, who kept a daily logbook of his life in Alaska during the gold rush.  For 14 years, he noted everything, journaling the minutiae of his daily life. “I am working with this,” she says, “but its taking a long time to transcribe and compile.  While it’s definitely a work of fiction, I can feel my great-grandfather, my father’s father, becoming vibrant, coming alive. It’s a little nerve-wracking, opening up family closets, but that’s how life is.”

These days, Tilley is a busy person.  As well as the novel in production, she writes, acts, and runs She Said Yes, a small theatre company based in St John’s. “It started as a way to produce my work when I graduated,” she says. “We get enough funding to put on shows and run a dramaturgy program.”  She finds theatre production very complementary to writing novels.  “They are finite,” she says.  “They end!”

Sara Tilley is an actress, playwright, theatre producer and author. Skin Room is her first novel and was short listed for the Thomas Raddall Fiction award at Atlantic Ink: The Writers’ Festival in 2009.  She lives in St John’s, Newfoundland.

The Story of a Widow

by Musharraf Ali Farooqi - Knopff Canada
 ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2009

Mona Ahmad is recently widowed. After the initial shock, she is surprised to find she has been left in very comfortable circumstances. She settles back into her house in Karachi, her days no longer defined by her husband’s presence.  She is gently intoxicated by her new freedom.

An unexpected marriage proposal, brokered through her neighbour, disrupts Mona’s quiet widowhood.  Her daughters, uncles, aunts and in-laws rush to her side, determined to protect both her and the family’s honour.  Their well oiled, highly effective gossip machine springs into action and in the absence of hard facts, hearsay and innuendo suffice.  Mona’s peaceful life collapses.

Surprising everyone, most of all herself, Mona rebels against tradition and remarries.  The consequences of this decision lead her to a contemplation of her life so far. She questions her first marriage and the roles she willingly shouldered as wife and mother, until finally she asks a profound question of herself.  The answer comes clearly as she begins to understand that her unhappiness is “a condition of her own creation”.  Her path becomes clearer.

The narrator takes a back seat in this book, functioning as a keen observer whose role is to keep us informed.  It is an effective technique, allowing the story to flow through the intricate nuances of family and Pakistani tradition.  Farooqi’s first novel is an entertaining and touching account of a traditional woman moving toward an understanding that life can be hers for the taking.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a writer and translator who was born in Hyderabad, Pakistan. His first children’s book, The Cobbler’s Holiday or Why Ants Don’t Where Shoes was released in 2008.  Musharraf Ali Farooqi lives in Toronto.

The Disappeared

by Kim Echlin ~ Hamish Hamilton

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald June 2009

Serey is a young Cambodian sent to Montreal to study.  He meets Anne and they fall in love, prowling the jazz clubs of Montreal.  But the rise of the Khymer Rouge closes Cambodia’s borders, and years pass before Serey is able to return home to look for his family.  He vanishes without word.  Eleven years later, Anne sees a blurred likeness on a TV news clip and flies to Phnom Penh to search for him.  

The backdrop of the Khymer Rouge’s regime of terror in the 1970's, which leaves an entire population traumatized and was responsible for the deaths of almost 2 million people, is not an easy counterpoint for a love story.  The challenge for Echlin ‘was to find a language that could tell the stories’, not just Anne’s story but of the people who suffered around her. 

Echlin writes with poetic intensity, moving through place and time with ease. The desperate poignancy of the stories Anne hears as she searches for her lover, and the sensual language of the love she feels is a mix that seems incompatible.  There are times when the magnitude of loss and grief seems beyond words.”  But Echlin’s ability to pare language to its essence is near perfect.

When an old woman tells Anne that she “lost my whole family during Pol Pot”, Anne is unsure how to respond, but there is nothing to say.  “I only want you to know,” she the woman.  It is for  Anne to bear witness. “And once we know, what do we do?”

In the final chapters Anne’s now middle-aged heart grieves for her lost lover, for those long lost and her story ends with a lament that has resounded through centuries.  “People everywhere look for their missing . . .Can no one find me even a bone to bury?” 

Kim Echlin is an author who completed her doctoral thesis on Ojibway storytelling.  She has travelled the world in search of stories and spent time in Cambodia researching The Disappeared.  She lives in Toronto.

The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb ~ Doubleday Canada

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011

           

Maggie Ly realizes early in her life that a career in art does not need to be defined by her lack of talent.  She becomes a curator and seizes an opportunity to return to Vietnam to catalogue a collection of art which somehow survived the war in a bomb shelter.  She has her own agenda - to look for her father, a dissident artist who vanished after the fall of Saigon. 

Her search leads her to Hung, an elderly itinerant cook whose pho is legendary, and it is Hung’s story that is the heart of Camilla Gibb’s new novel.  Hung has made pho at his street cart for decades, moving from place to place, creating a daily challenge for his dedicated customers who continue seek him out, chopsticks and bowl in hand.

Through years of poverty, war and hardship, Hung has endured, changing little as the city changed around him.  In the years since the war, Hanoi has become modern, bustling tourist city brimming with energy and youth.

The importance of family and community flows through Gibbs’s novel, with the elderly Hung holding the threads which gently bind the characters to each other.  They embrace Maggie, sympathizing with her need to find the truth, to understand her beginnings so she can finally feel that she belongs.  “She had always felt herself [to be] an alien to some degree ...you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place ... your roots are buried in some faraway earth.” 

Camilla Gibb is a winner of the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction.  The jury of the Orange Prize listed her as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.  She lives in Toronto.

I Am a Japanese Writer

by Dany Laferrière ~ Douglas & McIntyre

  ~ Review: Haliax Herald, January 2011

I Am a Japanese Writer is a book about a writer who pitches a title to his publisher, takes the publisher’s advance and immediately develops writer’s block as he contemplates actually writing the book. While he waits for it to pass, he decides he must understand a little of Japanese culture.

Trolling the city for insights, he finds the self-obsessed Midori and her hangers-on, who are immersed in the decadent, ‘uber-cool’ subcultures of fashion and drugs. They amuse him. He reads haiku master Basho on the subway. He is transported. He begins to believe his artifice.  “... when I became a writer and people asked me, ‘Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer?’ I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality.  Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer.” 

When the writer announces this in a mall, the results are astounding.  The book becomes a cult phenomenon and he is suddenly an international celebrity.  He is now famous for a book not yet written. Without reality, it exists because the writer is celebrated for it and therefore it no longer matters whether or not it exists, because it has taken off and, in the words of Tom Waites, he’s “Big in Japan”, which clearly raises the question of who makes art!

Translated from French by David Homel.

Dany Laferrière was born in Haiti and immigrated to Canada in 1978.  He is the author of twenty novels, and has won several awards, including the Prix Medicis for his semi-autobiographical novel, L'Enigme du retour (The Enigma of the Return).  His first children’s book, Je suis fou de Vava, won the Governor General’s award in 2006.  He lives in Montreal.

Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas ~ Thomas Allen & Son

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011

           

Meg is a writer, just managing to get by writing book reviews and ghost writing genre fiction for adolescents, which nets her just enough cash to buy groceries and keep her damp basement apartment slightly above freezing.

Her moody, jealous boyfriend seems oblivious to the ever rising damp and Meg’s efforts to jolly him out of his funks are met with indifference at best.  It is hard to understand what Meg sees in this sad-sack boyfriend, and when she finally makes a break for freedom from both him and the damp-infested apartment, Thomas’s reader will be thankful and slightly puzzled as to what took her so long.

A book mysteriously arrives in the mail, The Science of Living Forever, a pseudo-scientific book

about the end of time.  The very idea stops Meg in her tracks. Instead of dismissing the content as pop-psyche at best, Meg is pulled into the book’s premise.  Her‘proper’ novel morphs into a ‘storyless’ story, untidy and plot-less.

Our Tragic Universe is brimming with existential energy and philosophical debates as Meg struggles to extricate herself from her marginal existence.  Once again, Thomas explores relationships and the human condition, but these explorations are tempered by the application of the ‘storyless’ story, which does mean that the plot (or non-plot) takes place primarily in the debates of the characters.  Our Tragic Universe meanders, as was Thomas’s intention.  However, the wit and nuance of her writing hold it together, making Meg’s story sympathetic and compelling.

Scarlett Thomas is a teacher, award-winning novelist and book reviewer. In 2002, she was listed as one of the twenty best young British writers.  She teaches at the University of Kent in the UK where she specializes in the contemporary novel and narrative theory and practice.

Ape House

by Sara Gruen ~ Random House

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, December 2010

The Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, studies “language acquisition and cognition in great apes.”  Much of their work is with bonobos, a little known, highly intelligent and peaceful cousin to the chimpanzee.  During her research for Ape House, Sara Gruen managed to wangle an invitation to visit the Trust.  She was introduced to the bonobos  and she was hooked.  Her author’s note tells us that “most of the conversations between the bonobos and humans in (Ape House) are based on actual conversations with great apes”.

Ape House explores the implications of communications between humans and a species we recognize as highly intelligent but continue to keep imprisoned. 

The story follows Isabel Duncan, a scientist whom the bonobos at the Great Ape Language Lab in Kansas City consider family, and John Thigpen, a journalist who is sent to Kansas to find a story. But  Isabel is badly hurt when terrorists bomb the lab and kidnap the bonobos, and they become front page news overnight.  Even after they are recovered, the university moves quickly to stay away from controversy and sell the bonobos. An under-the -table deal is struck and the bonobos vanish.  Isabel is frantic to find them.

Ape House is a fascinating look at the culture of bonobos, and at their astonishing ability to communicate.  But it goes much further, looking at the boundaries of ethical research and the treatment of imprisoned animals as well as the implications of imprisoning animals who can learn to communicate with humans.

Sara Gruen was born in Vancouver.  She is the author of Water for Elephants which became an international best seller.  Ape House is her fourth novel.

Noah’s Turn

by Ken Finkleman ~ Harper Collins

 ~ Review: Halifax Herald, November 2010

Noah is a screenwriter, or was one, until he was laid off.  He wasn’t surprised.  He was less than passionate about the show and felt being a screenwriter was beneath his talents. But when his money pressures escalate, he takes to visiting his wealthy (and dying) aunt in the hopes of weaseling his way into her will.  But “he knew the rich didn’t get rich by giving it away ... and deep in his heart, he anticipated the worst.”  It came!

Enter Patrick McEwen, arrogant, condescending and successful, a published writer who teaches at U of T.  For Noah, their friendship is a love/hate relationship.  His envy of McEwen is of the green monster variety.  When McEwen is gloating about the launch of his latest novel, something inside Noah snaps.  He grabs a machete from the wall of McEwen’s office and kills him (a fact which is on the back cover of the book). The inexplicable murder makes huge headlines, and contrary to Noah’s run of luck, he doesn’t get caught.

The second half of Noah’s Turn tracks Noah as he takes all precautions to avoid detection. He realizes there is a good chance he’ll get away with it if he keeps on going ‘as normal’ but finds he cannot. He spirals downward into booze and drugs and debt.

There are problems with Noah’s ‘post-murder’ persona.  Until his nasty crime, Noah’s demeanor has been cynical and witty, creating a grudging sympathy for the state of his life.  But understanding a jealous and cynical mind is perhaps easier than understanding a murderer’s

rationalizing, and as Noah descends into addiction, his character lacks the edginess that entertained in the first half of the novel. In spite of this, Noah manages to continue to extract a certain sympathy from the reader, right to the ending you probably won’t see coming.  Finkleman has written a compelling debut novel.

Ken Finkleman is a writer, producer and actor for both television and movies.  He is created, produced and wrote the popular CBC Television series, The Newsroom.  Noah’s Turn is his first novel.

The Forty Rules of Love

by Elif Shafak ~ Viking

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, November 2010

Ella Rubenstein leads a middle class life in middle class America.  Her days are defined by the needs and demands of her unfaithful husband, their three children and even by her dog.  Looking for greater fulfillment, she becomes a reader for a publishing company and her first assignment is to assess a manuscript by the mysterious Aziz Zahara.

Elif Shafak’s latest book, The Forty Rules of Love, draws her readers into the lives of Shams of Tabriz, a wandering Sufi Dervish, and Mawlana Jalal ad-Din, also known as Rumi. Shams is sent by his order to Konya in Turkey to be a companion to the young Rumi, who is already a revered leader and scholar but dissatisfied with his spiritual progress.

The Forty Rules of Love moves back and forth in time, shifting from the gently unfolding affection between Ella and Aziz to the 13^th century Persia of Zahara’s manuscript.  Shafak weaves her forty rules through these modern and ancient narratives, via emails, tales, parables and through the conversations and stories of the book’s many narrators.

These varied stories chronicle the deepening spiritual connection between Shams and Rumi.

It is a complicated literary structure, but Shafak holds her threads expertly as she lays out the inclusive and tolerant principles of Sufism as they relate to the popular culture of the times, in both the 13^th and 21^st centuries. The Forty Rules of Love speaks directly to the heart.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and one of the most widely read writers in Turkey.  She writes her books in both Turkish and English, and they have been translated into more than 40 languages.  She lives in Istanbul.

Bride’s Farewell

by Meg Rosoff

Random House

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, October 2010

The day before her wedding, Pell suddenly sees the life of drudgery and dreariness that will be her future.  Poverty in 18^th century working class England is not kind to women and Pell sees the broken spirit of her mother clearly.  Her own spirit rebels and she flees in the night, taking Jack, her horse, and at the last minute her little brother who refuses to be left behind.  Her only plan is to head for the Salisbury Horse Fair, where she is sure she can make some money.

Pell has an unusual talent - an intuitive understanding of horses, akin to a ‘whisperer’.  It is this talent that catches the eye of a horse buyer.  They strike a deal, but the buyer swindles Pell of the promised money. Her brother and Jack become lost in the chaos after the fair and Pell is left with nothing. Her travels take a more desperate turn as she embarks on a search to recover those things most precious to her, and her money.

The Bride’s Farewell is a romantic adventure. Pell is a feisty heroine who would have held her own beside Nellie McClung or Emily Stowe, had time and circumstance allowed.  Rosoff’s writing is wonderfully visual, conjuring the reality of poor houses and the lives of the working class poor.  “... by the time Pell turned ten she and Lou had an expertise in stretching ends past straining point in an every-hopeful and ever-futile attempt to make them meet.” 

At the same time, Rosoff infuses her novel with love and laughter, in spite of the bleakness of everyday life.  From beginning to end is a flow of horses, as they are bought and sold, worked, ridden and loved.  Horses were an integral and essential part of eighteenth century life and Rosoff perfectly captures the magnificence of these creatures she so obviously loves.  And it is Rosoff’s beautiful imagery that leave her readers holding their breath, hoping the movie will come soon. 

Meg Rosoff has written three previous novels and is the winner of the Carnegie Medal for her novel Just in Case.  She lives in London, England.

Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

Random House

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, October 2010

Joe owns what has been a successful motor home business.  He sells RV’s and generally makes a good living for himself and his wife, Laurie.

Laurie, on the other hand, spends money faster than Joe can make it. Their lines of communication are stretched tautly as credit cards get rejected and bank accounts depleted.

The day finally comes when it’s all gone. Their house, their possessions and their self worth are sold, at a yard sale, to the bank. Joe and Laurie find themselves living in a stolen RV in a Walmart parking lot.

One morning, Joe leaves for the day and Laurie’s “premonition she had in Clara’s boutique was real.  Joe was gone.” Laurie finds herself alone, without money and very much without the continued support of the Walmart staff, whose initial kindness is stretched as they realize the RV squatters could become less than temporary.

Joe and Laurie both reach a pivotal moment in their separate lives, about the same time as the novel itself. Waiting for Joe takes time to ease into the story. It follows the parallel lives of Laurie, Joe and Alfred, Joe’s father who lives in a Winnipeg nursing home remembering the past and clinging to his elusive present.  Waiting for Joe is as much about Joe’s crisis of confidence as it is about Laurie struggling to find the strength within herself to go on alone.  Her successes are small, but cheer-worthy as she takes baby steps on a new path, finding strength and assistance in unlikely places.  “The goodwill embodied in a prayer goes somewhere, and like a moth, finds a source of light.”

Sandra Birdsell grew up in a large family in Winnipeg.  Her short stories and novels have garnered several awards, including the prestigious  Marion Engel Award.  She now gardens and writes in Saskatchewan.

Burmese Lessons: A Love Story

by Karen Connelly

Vintage Canada

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, September 2010

“Nostalgia is a Greek word.  A pain for the sweetness of home” and for Karen Connelly, home is where the heart is. She is a traveler, and when she went to Burma in the mid-nineties as a young journalist, her intention was to observe, to watch and wait, and to gather information. She was idealistic, obsessed with a desire to absorb the culture and language.

She soon moved into circles which brought her in contact with members of the resistance. And among them she found Maung, a young, charismatic leader of the resistance - or rather, he found her.  His magnetism was irresistible.  She fell deeply in love - with Maung, with Burma and with the Burmese people.  But this is an occupied country and these are not frivolous times.  “San Aung wants me to learn serious words ... death and freedom.  Democracy, cruel, trust, don’t trust … I lament the loss of my innocence.”

Burmese Lessons is part memoir, a sometimes travelogue and an extraordinary love story.

Connelly’s writing is sensual and dramatic, and the tastes and flavours of a country teetering on the edge of disaster juxtaposed against the gentle Buddhist culture linger long after her words are read and the book is closed. Her deep compassion for the Burmese people as they endure hardship beyond comprehension infuses her words, but it is her developing love for the charismatic Maung which finally causes her to confront the hard questions about herself, her future and the role she is plays in Burma. In every sense of the word, Burmese Lessons is a love story. 

Karen Connelly writes fiction, nonfiction and poetry.  Her first novel, The Lizard Cage, won Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Fiction in 2005 and her non-fiction book Touch the Dragon, won the Governor General's Award in l994.  She divides her time between  Greece and Toronto.