Kiss of the Fur Queen

Kiss of the Fur Queen, Cree playwright/pianist Tomson Highway’s debut novel, is the story of champion dog-sled racer Abraham Okimasis and his sons Jeremiah, a pianist, and Gabriel, a dancer. As the brothers journey from ... Read More »

February 20, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Marrow and Other Stories

By Nora Gold

It’s not surprising that a collection of short stories entitled Marrow (the kind found in bones) and containing a novella called Flesh would be preoccupied with the body. All the stories in Nora Gold’s debut ... Read More »

February 20, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

★ The Love of a Good Woman

By Alice Munro

Any new collection by Alice Munro is an eagerly awaited event, and despite the hype that the publishing industry is wont to practice, Munro is one of a few living writers who prove worthy of ... Read More »

February 20, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

A Recipe for Bees

By Gail Anderson-Dargatz

It’s a true storyteller who can build a compelling tale from the 48-year marriage between a psychic beekeeper and a mild-mannered farmer in rural B.C. Gail Anderson-Dargatz is up to the challenge with a suspensefully ... Read More »

February 20, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Caesarea

By Tony Burgess

In Tony Burgess’s Caesarea, the final book in his Bewdley trilogy and the name of a fictional small Ontario town, strange things are happening. Caesarea’s figurehead mayor has recently been replaced by a dwarf doppelganger. ... Read More »

February 19, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ A Student of Weather

By Elizabeth Hay

Two sisters fell down the same well, and the well was Maurice Dove.” This line encapsulates the conflict in A Student of Weather, Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s achingly good first novel. Beginning in the Prairie ... Read More »

February 19, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Enemy Women

By Paulette Jiles

In the last year of the American Civil War, young Adair Colley, the heroine of Enemy Women, sees her family’s farm in the Ozarks of Missouri burned, despite their attempts to remain neutral. Adair is ... Read More »

February 19, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The African-American Travel Guide

By Wayne C. Robinson

I bought a travel guide once. It ruined me for others. Despite Venice, Italy, its focus of fascination, the book’s toothless narrative and irksome use of the pronoun we – “as we near the gondola docks…we ... Read More »

February 19, 2004 | Filed under: Reference