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New Fiction ListRecent Acquisitions, April 2007 to April 2008
Gentleman DeathGraeme Gibson "Meet novelist Robert Fraser as he comes face to face with creativity, his mortality, and the deaths of his father and brother. Set mainly in Toronto, the novel also takes us to London, Scotland, Germany, and New York as we follow the escapades of two of Fraser's fictional characters. There is Simpson, called into service as an anonymous sperm donor, and Dunbar, an enigmatic tourist in Berlin just before the Chernobyl disaster, where he meets the captivating Lena, with whom he begins to sense an almost forgotten freedom and elation. But at the centre of "Gentleman Death is Robert Fraser's own compelling story. Gibson juxtaposes reality and fiction in this compassionate, sometimes outrageous, often very funny exploration of the absurdities and alarms of aging, the nature of fiction itself, and the maturity that grows from reconciliation." (Book Jacket) 
The Great ManKate Christensen "This penetratingly observed novel is less about the great man of its title than the women Oscar Feldman, fictional 20th-century New York figurative painter (and an infamous seducer of models as well as a neglectful father), leaned on and left behind: Abigail, his wife of more than four decades; Teddy, his mistress of nearly as many years; and Maxine, his sister, an abstract artist who has achieved her own lesser measure of fame. Five years after Feldman's death, as the women begin sketching their versions of him for a pair of admiring young biographers working on very different accounts of his life, long-buried resentments corrode their protectiveness, setting the stage for secrets to be spilled and bonds to be tested. Christensen (The Epicure's Lament) tells the story with striking compassion and grace, and her characters are fully alive and frankly sexual creatures. Distraction intrudes when real-world details are wrong (the A-train, for instance, doesn't run through the Bronx), and the novel's bookendsóan obituary and a book review, both ostensibly from the New York Timesóare less than convincing as artifacts. In all, however, this is an eloquent story posing questions to which there are no simple answers: what is love? what is family? what is art?" (Publishers Weekly) No New LandM.G. Vassanji "Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. A genial orderly at a downtown hospital, he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. Although he is innocent, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. Ultimately, his friendship with the enlightened Sushila offers him an alluring freedom from a past that haunts him, a marriage that has become routine, and from the trials of coping with teenage children. Introducing us to a cast of vividly drawn characters within this immigrant community, Vassanji is a keen observer of lives caught between one world and another." (Book Jacket) 
All Families are PsychoticDouglas Coupland "The Drummond family at the center of Coupland's new novel resembles a month's worth of soap opera plots. Wade Drummond and his mother, Janet, both have AIDS. Janet, 65, was infected when her ex-husband, Ted, shot Wade through the side of his stomach and the bullet lodged in Janet's lung. Ted shot Wade because his son had accidentally had sex with Ted's second wife, Nickie. In consequence, Nickie is also HIV positive. Wade's brother, Bryan, a frequently suicidal musician, has hooked up with the self-named Shw, a young anarchist. Shw has told Bryan she wants to abort her baby, but secretly she is planning to sell it to Lloyd and Gale, a seemingly normal Florida couple with kinky secrets. Now, all the Drummonds are having a family reunion in Orlando. They are gathered to support Sarah, the successful member of the family, as she is about to be shot into space. Although slightly crippled, being a thalidomide baby, Susan has made a career as a scientist and an astronaut. Her bland husband, Howie, is covertly sleeping with Alanna, the wife of Gordon Brunswick, Sarah's mission commander and Sarah is secretly having an affair with Gordon. The item that sets this crew in motion is a letter from Prince William left on Princess Diana's coffin. It has somehow come into possession of a sleazeball named Norm, who wants Wade and Ted to convey it to a billionaire Anglophile based in the Bahamas. Complications, naturally, ensue. Like Chuck Palahniuk, Coupland mines tabloid territory for sensationalism, which he then undermines with ironic self-awareness. The can-you-top-this atmosphere will keep Coupland's "Gen-X readers" (the ones who religiously watch Cops for the laughs) totally amused." - Publishers Weekly 
AmrikaM.G. Vassanji "The immigrant from Dar Es Salaam who narrates many parts of this novel by Vassanji 'The Book of Secrets' tells a compelling story of rebellion and its aftereffects, but a pervasive stylistic blandness lessens its impact. Ramji comes to America in 1968 to study at a technological institute in Cambridge, Mass. His extensive soul-searching during college involves participation in student demonstrations and residency at the ashram of a local guru. The novel then jumps 25 years ahead. Many of Ramji's revolutionary classmates have disappeared into comfortable middle-class lives, and Ramji himself is trapped in an unhappy marriage. After a divorce, he moves to Santa Monica, where he works for a political newspaper and lives with the beautiful student who wrecked his marriage. When he offers shelter to a young man who turns out to be a suspect in a couple of politically motivated bombings, he finds his home life dismantled by an unfortunate intersection of past and present. The story jumps intermittently from third-person to first-person narrative, a quirk sometimes revelatory, but other times merely jarring and gratuitous. Vassanji's strengths lie in his shrewd but economical characterizations, and also in his grappling with the explosive passions at play in his tale. His matter-of-fact storytelling style, however, applied to the drab lives Ramji's fellow immigrants lead after adopting Western traditions, eventually desiccates the novel, all the pathos leaking out of a hole somewhere near the book's center. It ends with a bittersweet and shocking episode, easily the most affecting passage in the book. Sadly, though, this ending would have been even more moving if Vassanji had focused on the novel's potential for provocation." - Publishers Weekly 
Bad Dirt : Wyoming Stories 2Annie Proulx Development with women / Dorienne Rowan-Campbell -- Targeting women or transforming institutions? : policy lessons from NGO anti-poverty efforts / Naila Kabeer -- Women in the informal sector : the contribution of education and training / Fiona Leach -- The evaporation of gender policies in the patriarchal cooking pot / Sarah Hlupelike Longwe -- Participatory development : an approach sensitive to class and gender / Dan Connell -- Sanctioned violence : development and the persecution of women as witches in South Bihar / Puja Roy -- Men’s violence against women in rural Bangladesh : undermined or exacerbated by microcredit programmes? / Sidney Ruth Schuler, Syed M. Hashemi and Shamsul Huda Badal -- Domestic violence, deportation, and women’s resistance / Purna Sen -- Women entrepreneurs in the Bangladeshi restaurant business / Mahmuda Rahman Khan -- Empowerment examined / Jo Rowlands -- The Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network / Hope Chigudu -- Dealing with hidden issues : trafficked women in Nepal / Meena Poudel and Anita Shrestha -- Power, institutions and gender relations : can gender training alter the equations? / Ranjani K. Murthy --Soup kitchens, women and social policy : case studies / Luiba Kogan. 
Cat's EyeMargaret Atwood "Herself the daughter of a Canadian forest entomologist, Atwood writes in an autobiographical vein about Elaine Risley, a middle-aged Canadian painter (and daughter of a forest entomologist) who is thrust into an extended reconsideration of her past while attending a retrospective show of her work in Toronto, a city she had fled years earlier in order to leave behind painful memories. Most pointedly, Risley reflects on the strangeness of her long relations with Cordelia, a childhood friend whose cruelties, dealt lavishly to Risley, helped hone her awareness of our inveterate appetite for destruction even while we love, and are understood as characteristically femininea betrayal of other women that masks a ferocious betrayal of oneself. Atwood's portrayal of the friendship gives the novel its fraught and mysterious center, but her critical assessment of Cordelia and the 'whole world of girls and their doings' also takes the measure of a coercive, conformist society (not quite as extreme as in the futuristic 'The Handmaid's Tale' ). Emerging 'the stronger' for her latecoming understanding of herself, Risley in the final pages rises above the ties that bound her, transcendently alive to the possibilities of 'light, shining out in the midst of nothing.' - Publishers Weekly 
Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes Saavedra "There would seem to be little reason for yet another translation of Don Quixote. Translated into English some 20 times since the novel appeared in two parts in 1605 and 1615, and at least five times in the last half-century, it is currently available in multiple editions (the most recent is the 1999 Norton Critical Edition translated by Burton Raffel). Yet Grossman bravely attempts a fresh rendition of the adventures of the intrepid knight Don Quixote and his humble squire Sancho Panza. As the respected translator of many of Latin America's finest writers (among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa), she is well suited to the task, and her translation is admirably readable and consistent while managing to retain the vigor, sly humor and colloquial playfulness of the Spanish. Erring on the side of the literal, she isn't afraid to turn out clunky sentences; what she loses in smoothness and elegance she gains in vitality. The text is free of archaisms the contemporary reader will rarely stumble over a word and the footnotes (though rather erratically supplied) are generally helpful. Her version easily bests Raffel's ambitious but eccentric and uneven effort, and though it may not immediately supplant standard translations by J.M. Cohen, Samuel Putnam and Walter Starkie, it should give them a run for their money. Against the odds, Grossman has given us an honest, robust and freshly revelatory Quixote for our times." - Publishers Weekly 
Eleanor RigbyDouglas Coupland "Liz Dunn isn't morbid, she's just a lonely woman with a very pragmatic outlook on life. Overweight, underemployed, and living in a nondescript condo with nothing but chocolate pudding in the fridge, she has pretty much given up on anything interesting ever happening to her. Everything changes when she gets an unexpected phone call from a Vancouver hospital and a stranger takes on a very intimate place in her life. From here the plot of Douglas Coupland's 'Eleanor Rigby' skyrockets into a very bizarre world, rife with reverse sing-alongs and apocalyptic visions of frantic farmers. The style and plot paths are very identifiably Coupland--slightly mystical, off-kilter, and very, very smart. Ultimately a novel about the burden of loneliness, 'Eleanor Rigby' takes its characters through strange and sometimes nearly unimaginable predicaments. " - Amazon.com Ernaux, Redonnet, Ba Et Ben Jelloun: Le Personnage Feminin a L'Aube De Xxieme SiecleMichele Aline Chossat 
Four Novels of the 1960sPhillip Dick This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original, mesmerizing, and surprising novels: 'The Man in the High Castle', 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch', 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?',and 'Ubik'." 
Gentleman Death Graeme Gibson "Meet novelist Robert Fraser as he comes face to face with creativity, his mortality, and the deaths of his father and brother. Set mainly in Toronto, the novel also takes us to London, Scotland, Germany, and New York as we follow the escapades of two of Fraser’s fictional characters. There is Simpson, called into service as an anonymous sperm donor, and Dunbar, an enigmatic tourist in Berlin just before the Chernobyl disaster, where he meets the captivating Lena, with whom he begins to sense an almost forgotten freedom and elation. But at the centre of 'Gentleman Death' is Robert Fraser’s own compelling story. Gibson juxtaposes reality and fiction in this compassionate, sometimes outrageous, often very funny exploration of the absurdities and alarms of aging, the nature of fiction itself, and the maturity that grows from reconciliation." - Amazon.com 
Girlfriend in a ComaDouglas Coupland "A high school senior makes love on a ski slope, then mixes drinks and drugs at a wild party and falls into a 17-year coma. She wakes up to find she has a daughter, delivered nine months into her coma. Her friends all seem diminished by the passage of time. Her boyfriend laments, 'What evidence have we ever given of inner lives?' Not long after, a plague kills off everyone on Earth but her friends. Even more bizarre happenings follow, leading to an unconvincing denouement. For the most part, however, Coupland has crafted a moving chronicle of the impoverished inner lives of a circle of materially rich young adults of the Nineties. Using punchy sentences filled with hip names and brand labels, he succeeds in capturing the weak sense of identity exhibited by a generation that has defined itself in terms of what it consumes and not what it could achieve." - Library Journal 
Hard TimesCharles Dickens "Grade 7-12- Dickens' satire on the Victorian family and the philosophies of a society which sought to turn men into machines." - School Library Journal 
Harry Potter and the Deathly HallowsJ.K. Rowling The Dark Lord ascending -- In memoriam -- The Dursleys departing -- The seven Potters -- Fallen warrior -- The ghoul in pajamas -- The will of Albus Dumbledore -- The wedding -- A place to hide -- Kreacher’s tale -- The bribe -- Magic is might -- The Muggle-born Registration Commission -- The thief -- The goblin’s revenge -- Godric’s Hollow -- Bathilda’s secret -- The life and lies of Albus Dumbledore -- The silver doe -- Xenophilius Lovegood -- The tale of the three brothers -- The Deathly Hallows -- Malfoy Manor -- The wandmaker -- Shell Cottage -- Gringotts -- The final hiding place -- The missing mirror -- The lost diadem -- The sacking of Severus Snape -- The Battle of Hogwarts -- The Elder Wand -- The prince’s tale -- The forest again -- King’s Cross -- The flaw in the plan. 
Helpless: A Novel Barbara Gowdy "Nine-year-old Rachel Fox has the face of an angel, a heart-stopping luminosity that strikes all who meet her. Her single mother, Celia, who works at a video store by day and a piano bar by night, is not always around to shield her daughter from the attention - both benign and sinister - her beauty draws. From modeling agencies, for example, or from Ron, a small-appliance repairman who, having seen Rachel once, 'is driven to see her again and again'. When a summer blackout plunges the city into darkness and confusion, Rachel is taken from her home. A full-scale search begins, but days pass with no clues, only a phone call Celia receives from a woman whose voice she has heard before but cannot place. As Celia fights her terror and Rachel starts to trust in her abductor's kindness, the only other person who knows where she is wavers between loyalty to the captor and saving the child. Will Rachel be found before her abductor's urge to protect and cherish turns to something altogether less innocent?"--BOOK JACKET. 
Hey Nostradamus! Douglas Coupland "Coupland has long been a genre unto himself, and his latest novel fits the familiar template: earnest sentiment tempered by sardonic humor and sharp cultural observation. The book begins with a Columbine-like shooting at a Vancouver high school, viewed from the dual perspectives of seniors Jason Klaasen and Cheryl Anway. Jason and Cheryl have been secretly married for six weeks, and on the morning of the shooting, Cheryl tells Jason she is pregnant. Their situation is complicated by their startlingly deep religious faith (as Cheryl puts it, 'I can't help but wonder if the other girls thought I used God as an excuse to hook up with Jason'), and their increasingly acrimonious relationship with a hard-core Christian group called Youth Alive! After Cheryl is gunned down, Jason manages to stop the shooters, killing one of them. He is first hailed as a hero, but media spin soon casts him in a different light. This is a promising beginning, but the novel unravels when Jason reappears as an adult and begins an odd, stilted relationship with Heather, a quirky court reporter. Jason disappears shortly after their relationship begins, and Heather turns to a psychic named Allison to track him down in a subplot that meanders and flags. Coupland's insight into the claustrophobic world of devout faith is impressive-one of his more unexpected characters is Jason's father, a pious, crusty villain who gradually morphs into a sympathetic figure-but when he extends his spiritual explorations to encompass psychic swindles, the novel loses its focus. Coupland has always been better at comic set pieces than consistent storytelling, and his lack of narrative control is particularly evident here. Noninitiates are unlikely to be seduced, but true believers will relish another plunge into Coupland- world." - Publishers Weekly 
Jpod: a novelDouglas Coupland "Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver video game design company. The six JPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a boneheaded marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is shaped (or twisted) by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China. Jpod's universe is amoral and shameless - and dizzyingly fast-paced. The characters are products of their era even as they're creating it. Everybody in Ethan's life inhabits a moral grey zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself. Full of word games, visual jokes, and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life."--BOOK JACKET. 
OffroadSean Murphy "Nothing says manly more than a yellow Jeep covered in mud. At least that's what art school student Kent thinks. Fresh from a messy breakup, Kent goes home to regroup. When he sees his friend Greg's brand-spanking-new Jeep, Kent seizes on the perfect way to reassert his masculinity—take that baby off road. Kent and Greg pick up their friend Brad, a burly guy who says what he thinks, often with his fists, and the testosterone level of the three combined is enough to convince them that driving a new Jeep through a swamp is a good idea—what could go wrong? When the Jeep inevitably gets stuck in the middle of the marsh, the three friends are forced to work out their problems. They face Brad's cheating father, Kent's snobby high school crush and her new beau, a pack of rednecks shooting fireworks at one another—and that's just the start. Kent's pigheadedness is both endearing and hilarious. Despite the big issues Kent and crew are wrestling with on their adventure, Murphy packs in enough tough guy humor to steer clear of any mushy stuff. With its angular, character-driven art, Murphy's Off Road is a delight." - Publishers Weekly 
Shampoo PlanetDouglas Coupland "Still a cultural pulse-taker, Coupland ('Generation X', '1991') organizes his hip bromides and next- wave sententiousness into a rather humdrum narrative that's long on posturing, short on plot. Laughing at disaster, Coupland's post-post-baby-boomers rationalize the culture of constant change, self-reinvention, and immediate gratification. Tyler Johnson, the 20-year-old narrator whose 'memories begin with Ronald Reagan', is an apocalyptic entrepreneur, a hotel-motel studies major who believes wholeheartedly in a boundless future, one he hopes to see as an employee for a northwestern conglomerate presided over by his personal hero, the CEO author of Life at the Top. A smart and glib media savant, Tyler speaks '`telethon-ese'' with his girlfriend and dubs his room at home the 'modernarium'. His mother, Jasmine, a hippie with armpit hair and a 'predilection for substance enthusiasts', represents everything that was wrong (in Tyler's view) about the Sixties. His grandparents, on the other hand, hoard their wealth and greedily pursue their pyramid sales scheme, marketing a cat food 'system'. Meanwhile, Tyler's summer fling in Paris comes to haunt him. The haughty and selfish Stephanie, one of the 'low-ambition Euro-teens' he met on vacation, convinces him to move to L.A. with her in pursuit of fame and riches. Their adventures on the road include a visit to the commune where Tyler was born and a nightmarish stay at his father's drug farm. In L.A., Tyler works a fast-food `McJob', while Stephanie secretly finds a sugar-daddy. Chastened by his low-life in la-la-land, Tyler returns home, rewarded with a dream job and a happier family. This TV/computer/video-savvy fiction is a frank celebration of life as a series of theme parks. Coupland's social commentary is, at its worst, fortune-cookie profound and, at best, a gloss on the Zeitgeist." - Kirkus Reviews 
SurrenderSonya Hartnett "Grade 9 Up–When Anwell was seven, he caused the death of his developmentally disabled older brother. Several years later, he meets a boy his age, a wild child named Finnigan, and the two forge an unorthodox yet formidable bond. As this psychological thriller gracefully unfolds, Anwell–who now calls himself Gabriel, in reference to the archangel–and Finnigan take turns narrating an array of possible facts, probable lies, and half-truths. That Anwell/Gabriel's parents are cold and repressive is probably true. That Finnigan ever intended to keep his promise to be Gabriel's friend is patently false. Through the years of the boys adolescence, their small Australian town is plagued by arson. Anwell's father gathers a vigilante troop to ward away the firebug while his son curries favor with the local cop by telling him when and where the vigilantes are headed. The boys share a hound named Surrender; he is a thief and marauder, not unlike at least one of his owners. As this stew of unhappiness, mischief, and outright criminality unwinds–apparently while young Gabriel lies on his deathbed–readers come to realize that he is schizophrenic. Whether his avenging efforts truly come to murder, in the form of patricide, isnt crystal clear. But it doesn’t need to be: the plot is relentless, just as Finnigan's efforts to torture Gabriel and Gabriel's efforts to quell Finnigan appear to be in the end." - School Library Journal 
Swimming in the Monsoon SeaShyam Selvadurai "Grade 9 Up–In Sri Lanka in 1980, 14-year-old Amrith is forced to confront his feelings about his birth family when Niresh, a cousin from Canada, visits. He falls in love with the boy, jealously refusing to share him with his adoptive sisters, in spite of their obvious interest. Amrith is a gentle, innocent boy from an anglicized and privileged world of private school, country club, and numerous servants, so readers will be surprised at the intensity evoked by his first sexual feelings. Mirroring the rage of Othello, the play his school is producing, he almost causes a tragedy before coming to terms with his anger at his family and his own sense of difference. The arc of this sensitive coming-of-age story moves slowly but inexorably to its breaking point, lingering over details of Sri Lankan life. Thunderous monsoon storms set the mood and detailed descriptions of the landscape, architecture, and food provide the backdrop. The author's affection for the country of his childhood is evident in this sympathetic and insightful look at first love." - School Library Journal 
The Assassin's SongM.G. Vassanji "In the aftermath of the brutal violence that gripped western India in 2002, Karsan Dargawalla, heir to Pirbaag - the shrine of a mysterious, medieval sufi - begins to tell the story of his family and the shrine now destroyed. His tale opens in the 1960s: young Karsan is next in line after his father to assume lordship of the Shrine of the Wanderer, and take his place as a representative of God to the multitudes who come there. But he longs to be 'just ordinary'- to play cricket and be part of the exciting world he reads about in the stacks of newspapers a truck driver brings him from all across India. And when, to his utter amazement, he is accepted at Harvard, he can't resist the opportunity to go finally 'into the beating heart of the world'. Despite his father's epistolary attempts to keep Karsan close to traditional ways, the excitements and discoveries of his new existence in America soon prove more compelling, and after a bitter quarrel he abdicates his successorship to the ancient throne. Yet even as he succeeds in his' ordinary' life - marrying and having a son, becoming a professor in suburban British Columbiahis heritage haunts him in unexpected ways. After tragedy strikes, both in Canada and in Pirbaag, he is drawn back across thirty years of separation and silence to discover what, if anything, is left for him in India." -BOOK JACKET. 
The Book of SecretsM.G. Vassanji "After his initial examination of the 'book of secrets', a fragment of a diary by a turn-of-the-century colonial official stationed in a remote outpost in British East Africa, the narrator, Pius Fernandes, soon loses his scientific objectivity as he finds himself continuing the story that this diary begins. In the prolog, he writes: 'Because it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows'. The diary has a life of its own, creating or rewriting history as the vagaries of its contents raise unanswerable questions for its readers that then shape the future direction of their lives. Fernandes finds himself reexamining his own life as an immigrant, comparing his own experiences with those of the colonial official, finding his own recent past connected to the more distant past represented in the diary, and reconsidering certain important relationships, the memories of which resurfaced because of his efforts to solve the diary's conundrums. The many layers of Vassanji's award-winning novel cannot be addressed here. A work of art, it well deserves Canada's GillerPrize, of which it is the first recipient. Highly recommended for all libraries without exception." - Library Journal 
The Gum ThiefDouglas Copeland "In Douglas Coupland's new novel - think 'Clerks' meets 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' - we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged 'aisles associate' at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life; and Roger's co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at 'fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6.' One day, Bethany discovers Roger's notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she realizes that the old guy is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her: and, spookily, he is getting her right. These two retail workers strike up an extraordinary epistolary relationship. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger's work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond. A raucous tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party, Roger's opus is a Cheever- style novella gone horribly wrong. But as key characters migrate into and out of its pages, Glove Pond becomes an anchor of Roger's unsettled - and unsettling - life."--BOOK JACKET. 
The In-Between World of Vikram LallM.G. Vassanji "As an Indian child growing up in 1950s Kenya, Vikram Lall is at the center of two warring worlds—one of childhood innocence, the other 'a colonial world of repressive, undignified subjecthood' in which the innocent often meet with the cruelest of fates. He passes his early days in Nakuru playing with his sister, Deepa, their neighborhood friend Njoroge, and English expatriates Annie and Bill Bruce. Though Vic is third-generation African, he understands that Njo is somehow more Kenyan than he or his family will ever be. Police regularly raid Nakuru looking for Mau Mau rebels, who are terrorists in the eyes of Europeans, but freedom fighters to native Kenyans; one day tragedy strikes the Lall family's English friends. Haunted by a grisly description of the crime scene, the Lalls eventually pick up and move to Nairobi. Fast-forward to 1965, when Kenya has achieved independence and Mau Mau sympathizer Jomo Kenyatta is now the president of the nation. Njo, who worshipped Jomo from an early age, is a rising star in the new government. He tracks down the Lalls in Nairobi and begins an innocent courtship of Deepa, much to her parents' chagrin. Meanwhile, Vic continues to allow his memory of young Annie to define his life and, as a result, makes some morally ambiguous judgments when he lands a position in the new government. Telling his story from Canada, where he fled after getting top billing on Kenya's 'List of Shame' as one of the most financially corrupt men in his country, Vic is a voice for all those who wonder about the price of the struggle for freedom. Vassanji, who was the 2003 winner of Canada's Giller Prize, explores a conflict of epic proportions from the perspective of a man trapped in 'the perilous in-between', writing with a deftness and evenhandedness that distinguish him as a diligent student of political and historical complexities and a riveting storyteller." - Publishers Weekly 
The RoadCormac McCarthy "Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, 'The Road', in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith." -Dennis Lehane (Amazon.com) 
The Shipping NewsAnnie Proulx "Proulx has followed Postcards , her story of a family and their farm, with an extraordinary second novel of another family and the sea. The fulcrum is Quoyle, a patient, self-deprecating, oversized hack writer who, following the deaths of nasty parents and a succubus of a wife, moves with his two daughters and straight-thinking aunt back to the ancestral manse in Killick-Claw, a Newfoundland harbor town of no great distinction. There, Quoyle finds a job writing about car crashes and the shipping news for The Gammy Bird , a local paper kept afloat largely by reports of sexual abuse cases and comical typographical errors. Killick-Claw may not be perfect, but it is a stable enough community for Quoyle and Co. to recover from the terrors of their past lives. But the novel is much more than Quoyle's story: it is a moving evocation of a place and people buffeted by nature and change. Proulx routinely does without nouns and conjunctions- 'Quoyle, grinning. Expected to hear they were having a kid. Already picked himself for godfather'- but her terse prose seems perfectly at home on the rocky Newfoundland coast. She is in her element both when creating haunting images (such as Quoyle's inbred, mad and mean forbears pulling their house across the ice after being ostracized by more God-fearing folk) and when lyrically rendering a routine of gray, cold days filled with cold cheeks, squidburgers, fried bologna and the sea. " - Publishers Weekly 
Travels with Charley and later novels, 1947-1962John Steinbeck
"This volume collects four novels that exhibit the full range of John Steinbeck's gift, along with a travel book that has become one of his most enduringly popular works. In 'The Wayward Bus' (1947), Steinbeck leads a group of ill-matched passengers representing a spectrum of social types and classes, stranded by a washed-out bridge, on a circuitous journey that exposes cruelties, self- deceptions, and unsuspected moral strengths. The tone ranges from boisterous comedy to trenchant satirical observation of postwar America. 'Burning Bright' (1950), an allegory set against shifting backgrounds (circus, sea, farm) and revolving around the fear of sterility and the desire for self- perpetuation, marks Steinbeck's involvement with the drama in its fusion of the forms of novel and play. 'Sweet Thursday' (1954) marks Steinbeck's return, in a mood of sometimes frothy comedy, to the characters and milieu of his earlier 'Cannery Row'. A love story set against the background of the local brothel, the Bear Flag, 'Sweet Thursday'' is for all its intimations of melancholy one of the most lighthearted of Steinbeck's books. It was subsequently adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into their musical 'Pipe Dream'. Steinbeck's final novel, 'The Winter of Our Discontent' (1961) is set in an old Long Island whaling town modeled on Sag Harbor, where he had been spending time since 1953. The book breaks new ground in its depiction of the crass commercialism of contemporary America, and its impact on a protagonist with traditionalist values who is appalled but finally tempted by the encroaching sleaziness. 'Travels with Charley in Search of America' (1962) was Steinbeck's last published book. A record of his experiences and observations as he drove around America in a pickup truck, accompanied by his standard poodle Charley, it is filled with engaging, often humorous description and comes to a powerful climax in an encounter with racist demonstrators in New Orleans."--BOOK JACKET. 
Wayward Girls & Wicked Women Angela Carter "In Elizabeth Jolley's 'The Last Crop', a seemingly guileless woman cons a man out of his land. In Leonora Carrinton's 'The Debutante', a young girl sends a hyena to her coming-out ball, with disastrous results. The title character in Frances Towers's 'Violet' uses her talent for witchcraft with wicked intention. Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl' faces a litany of her mother's strictures and admonishments, and Suniti Namjoshi's bittersweet fables suggest that nothing a woman does will ever be really right. But whether these women are bad or good, evil or benign, guilty or innocent, calculating or naďve, they are not victims. None of them suffers passively at the hands of men. Each manages to confront her circumstances and sometimes, though not always, triumph over them. " - Syndetics.com 
Zuckerman Bound: a Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985 Phillip Roth "This volume presents the trilogy of novellas and epilogue that constitute 'Zuckerman Bound' (1985), Philip Roth's original investigation into the unforeseen consequences of art - mainly in libertarian America and then, by contrast, in Soviet-suppressed Eastern Europe - during the latter half of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET |
