Quill and Quire

Fiction: Novels

★ Forde Abroad

By John Metcalf

John Metcalf has not published a stand-alone book of fiction in some 10 years. This is unfortunate, because he is one of Canada’s best writers. With the publication of Forde Abroad, a brilliant 80-page novella, ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Deafening

By Frances Itani

The flood of books about the First World War never seems to end. In the past few years, we’ve had Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, John Keegan’s The First World War and of course, ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Sea of Tranquility

By Lesley Choyce

Ragged Island, Lesley Choyce’s fictional community off the Nova Scotia mainland, has survived centuries of various economic catastrophes through the entrepreneurial inventiveness of its inhabitants. Recent ventures include Phonse Doucette’s shoot-’em-up junkyard and Moses Slaunwhite’s ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Working Class Zero

By Rob Payne

One of the challenges facing the contemporary novelist is to capture the complexities and absurdities of modern life without boring the reader. Rob Payne manages to do this and make us laugh too. In Working ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Hey Nostradamus!

By Douglas Coupland

Hey Nostradamus! is one of Douglas Coupland’s minor-key efforts. It doesn’t have the operatic heft of All Families Are Psychotic or the poppin’ fresh teen spirit of such earlier works as Microserfs. If anything, Coupland ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

When She Was Electric

By Andrea MacPherson

When She Was Electric, a first novel from Vancouver author Andrea MacPherson, suffers from a sense of familiarity, a reliance on structural clichés that damages, almost irrevocably, this otherwise interesting debut. MacPherson’s narrative treads perilously ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Significant Things

By Helen McLean

Edward Cooper begins life in near-Dickensian circumstances, in a single room on Brunswick Avenue in Depression-era Toronto. Though he and his pretty, unmarried English mother have only each other and a meagre allowance from her ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Wisdom of Water

By Karen Hood-Caddy

The setting in The Wisdom of Water isn’t Walkerton, Ontario, site of one of the country’s worst environmental disasters, but it’s eerily similar: tainted water from an outdated treatment plant, malfunctioning equipment, and an irresponsible ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels