Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

★ White Lung

By Grant Buday

Grant Buday has an exceptional talent for creating characters who are resonantly alive, frequently funny, largely despicable, yet unavoidably sympathetic.In his latest book, Buday creates a rollicking black comedy of errors with moments of genuine ... Read More »

February 10, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Semi-detached

By Cynthia Holz

When my father retired, my mother used to quote the wife of baseball great Casey Stengel: “I married him for better or for worse, but not for lunch.” Barbara, the heroine of Cynthia Holz’s new ... Read More »

February 10, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Balloon

By Tim Wynveen

One of the themes of Tim Wynveen’s second novel – his first was the Commonwealth Prize winner Angel Falls – is intergenerational resentment. It therefore seems appropriate to mention that, as a nominal member of ... Read More »

February 10, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Pilgrim

By Timothy Findley

Strange and ambitious and engaging are the adjectives that come most readily to mind after reading Timothy Findley’s new novel, Pilgrim. The eponymous hero is encumbered with a mythic, folkloric liability. Pilgrim can’t die, no ... Read More »

February 10, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Wife Tree

By Dorothy Speak

Dorothy Speak’s first novel, The Wife Tree, is probably not the book to read if you’re feeling pessimistic about relations between men and women. While the book ends with Morgan Hazzard, its 70-something heroine, ready ... Read More »

February 9, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Cover Me

By Mariko Tamaki

A striking deadpan humour sets the narrative tone in Toronto writer Mariko Tamaki’s fiction debut, Cover Me. Over the course of lunch with her wise-cracking father in a downtown Chinese restaurant, narrator Traci Yamoto describes ... Read More »

February 9, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

What We All Want

By Michelle Berry

Michelle Berry’s two short-story collections are informed by a sharply mordant edge, their haunting characters anything but typical van-owning suburbanites. Her skilled first novel continues to dig over that terrain. What We All Want is ... Read More »

February 9, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels