Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

Cumberland

By Michael V. Smith

Closeted gay men can suffer excruciatingly, especially in society’s rougher quarters. Where platonic love between working men is still viewed with suspicion, romantic and/or sexual love is most certainly taboo. A challenge to that taboo ... Read More »

January 22, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Blur

By Michelle Berry

High-pulp authors from Raymond Chandler to Robert Ferrigno to the newest sensation, Bruce Wagner, have taken the beautiful horror of Los Angeles – its sheen, its viciousness, its generations of celebrity skin – and from ... Read More »

January 22, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Rush Home Road

By Lori Lansens

While wonderful novels about the black immigrant experience are not uncommon in Canada, few novelists, black or white, have written about the country’s long-settled black communities. First-time novelist Lori Lansens – a white screenwriter living ... Read More »

January 22, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Moody Food

By Ray Robertson

Conflict is story. Not all novels follow formulas, but a simple and effective formula is to give your protagonist a goal, then create conflict by presenting an obstacle to that goal. In fact, there will ... Read More »

January 21, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Some Girls Do

By Teresa McWhirter

Using a Vancouver Island city as a backdrop (likely Victoria but it’s never confirmed), Some Girls Do delves into the chaotic lives of more than a dozen characters in their mid-twenties to early thirties – ... Read More »

January 21, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Icarus

By Louise Young

There is a telling scene in Louise Young’s debut novel Icarus where a somewhat pragmatic character remarks of recent mystical events that “This is beyond the beyond.” Indeed, the novel, which tends to defy categorization ... Read More »

January 21, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels