God, I love a woman who can swear! And Beverley Stone is right up there with the best of them. This beautiful, disturbing book is one of the most honest tales of contemporary Newfoundland I’ve come across. Part-Trailer Park Boys and part-Thelma and Louise, it’s an account of teenagers Bride Marsh and Wanda Stuckless’s attempt to leave out-port Newfoundland for life in Toronto, a challenge much bigger than it sounds. Bride is the sexy one who gets hit on by men, while Wanda is the entrepreneurial tomboy who sells dope to make her passage ‘away.’ Both prove hindrances to their goal. A sharp blend of the comic and tragic, Stone’s story is filled with wisdom, insight and some very deft writing.

This is a perfect little gem of a book, as concise and brilliantly conceived as The Great Gatsby. The action takes off like a rocket following the end of the American civil war. At the book’s center are Bayard Sartoris, son of a confederate hero, and the slave Ringo, in a pairing as memorable as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Bayard’s narration is one of the most successful and appealing first-person voices in literature, as he gives a trenchant portrait of a society in decline. Gone are Faulkner’s long-winded philosophical treatises, while his humour, drama and moral ambiguities are sharpened with moving and powerful results. I only wonder why the book's last word is "horses" rather than "courage."

I was a bit surprised by this book.  Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, is the funniest book I’ve ever read.  For starters, it’s a novel disguised as a cookbook.  Yet this, his second book, I found only passably amusing.  Much of the humour centers on sex and sexual repression and to my mind the British just aren’t at their best on the subject.  (To be honest, only a gay man can really do it justice.  And yes, Margaret Cho qualifies as a gay man as far as I’m concerned.)  In Mr. Phillips, an accountant accustomed to living life as a series of certainties and probabilities encounters a day so bizarre it loses all meaning for him.  After a series of random, improbable occurrences upsets Mr. Phillips’s routine, he begins to reassess his entire life.  The set-up is fine and the novel isn’t a total snore, just oddly lacking in laughs.  But that’s what we get for having expectations, innit?

I’d heard conflicting reports about Walters’s books—both raves and pans. Recently my father gave me a copy of Disordered Minds and I found it a genuine page-turner, though the story came straight from the headlines of English tabloids. I’ve since delved into her early books and find them far less convincing psychologically. Much of it is geared to a TV level of writing, and both the characters and stories are largely unbelievable. Add The Ice House to that list. I wondered then, why I still enjoy Agatha Christie. Apart from some diabolically clever plotting, the prose is horrible (no small statement considering she’s the best selling author in English, surpassing even Shakespeare.) I think the secret lies with Christie’s characters: she makes them believable in a way many contemporary mystery writers don’t, ratcheting up the suspense with extraordinary plot turns instead. “Character is destiny.” So proclaimed 6^th century BCE Greek philosopher Heraclitus. All the special effects and sensational plot twisting in the world doesn’t make that any less true in a murder mystery.

What’s interesting about this book is it’s an attempt to bring a naturalist take to what often feels like a moribund, formulaic and increasingly unconvincing genre. More an intellectual puzzle than a thriller, the suspense quotient is low in Poulson's take on murder in academia, but the psychology is convincing (except for one stunner where the victim of an attempted murder is left alone in a hospital bed during a fire drill.) What if, the author seems to say, a murder is committed but the people involved don’t recognize it as such? This is what it might just look like.

I don’t recall when I first read Salinger’s short stories, but it was around three decades ago. At the time I was a fan of The Catcher in the Rye, but it’s the novellas I love now—they're perfection of a kind. Salinger once considered himself Fitzgerald’s successor, and that’s evident here in the way he shows off stylistically as well as in the adolescent humour typical of Fitzgerald’s early writing. The pieces in this collection, once called ‘brilliant’ by critics, now seem showy and contrived: A Perfect Day for Bananafish and even For Esmé—with Love and Squalor, which I thought I would love again on second sight, but didn’t. The story that struck me as the best of the lot is Teddy, about a 10-year-old mystic who predicts his own death. It still gives me goosebumps. As ghoulish as it may sound, I’m looking forward to seeing what waits to be published after Salinger’s death.
 

Landing is a humorous and moving literary novel about a chance meeting between a young Canadian woman and a middle-aged Irish woman on a plane over the Atlantic. The encounter changes both their lives as Jude and Silé’s long-distance relationship grows, against all expectations, leaving them to straddle not only the Atlantic but also the pitfalls of culture shock and commitment issues as the worldly Silé tries to come to terms with the younger Jude’s life in rural Canada.

Other Men’s Sons is the 2008 Randy Shilts Award-winning book of creative non-fiction by Torontonian Michael Rowe. The writing is intelligent and witty and the subjects varied—from the title essay about Michael and his partner’s attending the wedding of their "adopted" straight son (whom they met when he was 19), through an essay about a young woman who grew up in a supportive gay environment and had to learn to contend with other people’s homophobia, to the story of Pvt. Barry Winchell, murdered by a fellow soldier when it was discovered Winchell was dating a transsexual. Each of these pieces is insightful and beautifully written but, perhaps best of all, the book is uplifting despite its sometimes tragic themes.