Notable titles:
- Winter’s End by Mark Helprin;
- The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman;
- Old Filth by Jane Gardam.
Category: Contemporary
August 2013
Double Fault by Lionel Shriver;
And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
July 2013
- Majorr. Pettigrew’s Last Stand – Helen Simonson (very British story of honour and duty, unrequited love, racism and sexism …)
- The Boy In The Striped Pajamas – John Boyne (the tragedy of the holocaust from the contrasting viewpoints of two nine year-old boys)
- Behind The Scenes At The Museum – Kate Atkinson (her first book, excellent story-telling, both funny and sad; another “bad mother” book cf. Silver Star)
- The Painted Girls – Cathy Marie Buchanan (1880s Paris, three sisters and a dissolute single mother; one sister joins the ballet and is the model for Edgar Degas’ “Little Dancer Age 14”. A hard life)
April 2013
- Lionel Asbo (Martin Amis);
- Bone and Bread (Saleema Nawaz; complex relationship between sisters in a story set mostly in Montreal’s Mile End);
- How To Be A Woman (Caitlin Moran; stories about growing up in England, alternating between hysterically funny and insightful/poignant);
- The Tiny Wife (Andrew Kaufman; only 85 small pages but such an imagination)
March 2013
Y by Marjorie Celona (sad story of a child abandoned after birth and left at the YMCA in Victoria; her life in foster care and the back story of her mother and the events that led to the abandonment);
Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante (mystery involving a murder with the chief suspect being someone who is slipping into dementia).
February 2013
Impostor Bride by Nancy Richler
December 2012
Defending Jacob (William Landay);
My Life (Alice Munro).
What David Read 