Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay

This book won the Giller Prize this year, and I think (after some reflection) it was deserved, although I’m still overwhelmed that Cloud of Bone, which I think is a better novel than most of the shortlist, wasn’t nominated. But I’ll lay aside my bitterness over that enough to admit that Late Nights on Air [...]

The Barefoot Believers, by Annie Jones

The Barefoot Believers is a light and engaging Christian novel about two sisters whose lifelong rivalry comes to a head in midlife when they find themselves stranded together at their family’s old vacation home, each with an injury that restricts mobility, forced to rely on and put up with each other. While there, one [...]

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve been meaning to read this one for awhile. I’m not sure why.  I have all kinds of issues with people who tell me I should do more for the environment, especially if it involves changing my eating habits.  I’ve blogged about this already and I will blog some more about it in the near [...]

Good Grief, by Lolly Winston

Good Grief was another one of those serendipitous judging-a-book-by-its-cover library discoveries I was very happy to have made.  In one of Anne Lamott’s books she talks about going to a library during her father’s illness and looking for the funny books about cancer — and getting a strange look.  I think you’d get the same [...]

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta

There are books I plan to read, books that are recommended to me or that I catch a review of, like the five or six books currently on my “Want to Read” list on Facebook’s Visual Bookshelf. Then there are books that I’ve never heard of, that catch my eye entirely by accident, often as [...]

Whistling in the Dark, by Lesley Kagen

Whistling in the Dark is the story of Sally and Troo, two pre-adolescent sisters growing up in a working-class Milwaukee neighbourhood in the late 1950s. Behind the usual nostalgia for childhood in a simpler time is a dark shadow: two young girls have been molested and murdered in the neighbourhood in the last year, [...]

The Turning, by Tim Winton

The Turning is another of the books that was recommended and given to me while I was in Australia. Before I even opened the cover I had to overcome two of my deep-seated prejudices: I’m resistant to fiction by men (despite numerous great examples to the contrary), and I generally don’t enjoy short stories. [...]

Testament, by Nino Ricci

Testament is a gorgeously written re-telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth — not the story of the divine Son of God, but of a compelling and complex human being in first-century Galilee. The story is told in four parts from the perspective of four different characters — Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene, Mary [...]