The Taste of Metal: A Deserter's Story

Literature & Fiction

Todd, Jack

World Literature

HarperflamingoCanada

It is the year 1934, and in a small town in Canada, Clara Callan reluctantly takes leave of her sister, Nora, who is bound for the show business world of New York. It's a time when people escape from reality through radio and the movies, when the Dionne Quints make headlines, when the growing threat of fascism in Europe is a constant worry, and the two sisters -- vastly different in personality yet inextricably linked by a shared past -- try to find their place within the complex web of social expectations for young women in the 1930s.While Nora embarks on a glamorous career as a radio soap opera star, Clara, a strong and independent-minded woman, struggles to observe the ...

Clara Callan: A novel

Wright, Richard Bruce

The Romantic

For lovers of literary fiction, The Romantic is Barbara Gowdy’s utterly absorbing tale of love, longing, and loss. It is the story of Louise, whose former beautyqueen mother disappears one day, leaving a note that reads only—and incorrectly—“Louise knows how to work the washing machine.” Louise promptly falls passionately in love with Mrs. Richter, the new neighbor, and then with Abel, Mrs. Richter’s nature-loving, enigmatic son. Despite the fact that Abel moves away, Louise becomes more and more fixated on him, discovering that she cannot get Abel to love her as fiercely as she loves him. Only when she is forced to confront another great loss is she finally able to confront the costs of losing herself to another.The Romantic is a powerful exploration of the many incarnations of love in all of its painful and joyful variations, a novel that glows with Barbara Gowdy’s note-perfect style, gentle humor, and unforgettable characters.

GOWDY, BARBARA

HarperFlamingo Canada

This pipe felt good, its cold sides penetrated through his jacket and made him feel more awake than he’d had in weeks. And there was something about cars passing without being able to see him that gave him a sort of satisfaction. He was hidden from the street, from anyone walking by and was cocooned in cement. Transported. Slowly the muscles in his body relaxed, his legs, his neck, though he hadn’t even realized they’d been tight. He felt himself breathe and with each exhale felt tension leave his body. Outside something began tapping the pipe. He opened his eyes, startled by the sound of a sort of scraping along the top of it as if something was being dragged against the cement. For a moment he though it might be an animal but quickly dismissed the idea, the sound being almost metallic. He waited, hoping whoever it was would continue walking and was surprised at how afraid he was. The sound of his heart seemed to slide from his ears and mouth into the pipe where it echoed and kept an ominous beat like a bad horror movie, he thought, the killer taking one slow step at a time… —From LuresGrace is 17 and wonders why she feels different. Sheila, her mother, spends endless hours cleaning, furiously trying to scrub away the stubborn pain leaching through the plastic-encased surface of their immaculate home. Gary, her brother, hides in the basement, squinting at life through a haze of pot smoke. Les, her father, finds instant gratification in buying an endless parade of gadgets, each one promising to give him the respect and power he craves. It’s no wonder that Lily’s family seems so normal to Grace. Attracted by her friend’s warm, bright house and caring parents, Grace searches for a refuge of love and acceptance. But although they hardly know each other, a secret thread connects both families, slowly and inexorably unraveling their lives.With lyrical grace and formidable story telling talent, Susan Goyette builds her first novel to a climax that is raw in its emotional power, yet sensitive and ultimately redemptive in its portrayal of people snared by their own pain. There is suffering, but also great beauty and hope in Goyette’s poetically drawn small-town world. Lures is a novel that is difficult to put down, driven by the remarkable writing skill of a writer who will be welcomed as one of the best new voices in today’s literary fiction.

Lures: A novel

Goyette, Susan

Used book in good condition, due to its age it could contain normal signs of use

Madame Zee

Luke, Pearl

Contemporary

Harpercollins Canada

Enemy Women

Book is used and has been withdrawn from service from a Library. Book has a Library Binding and the usual Library Stamps, Stickers, Card Holder, Library Markings. May or May Not have a Dust Jacket.

Jiles, Paulette

William Morrow

Diane Schoemperlen has been described variously as “one of the most vibrant and original voices in our literature,” “incredibly intelligent and observant,” “funny,” and “creatively innovative.”She was the 1998 winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for Forms of Devotion, her collection of short stories and pictures. And her most recent novel, the bestselling Our Lady of the Lost and Found, is being simultaneously released in trade paperback as this newest collection appears on the shelves. With Red Plaid Shirt, Schoemperlen shows that she is a writer at the top of her form an intriguing, wonderfully shape-shifting one, at that. Red Plaid Shirt presents 21 perfectly formed stories, a blend of favorites, out-of-print pieces and new work, all displaying Schoemperlen’s trademark wit, subtle irony and gift for turning everyday domesticities into dynamic, provocative prose. “Losing Ground”is a coming-of-age story in which a teenage girl starts to see herself as separate from her family. In “This Town,” Schoemperlen creates a witty newcomers’ guidebook to an ordinary town complete with handy cross-references. In “A Simple Story,” a tale of a man and his mistress is gradually uncovered, as a seemingly simple car accident unravels an epic tangle of lives and loves. As always, these are compulsively readable stories, deliciously difficult to resist, proving once again that Schoemperlen’s voice is as fresh, funny, and electric as ever.

Red Plaid Shirt

SCHOEMPERLEN, Diane

Literary

Phyllis Bruce Books

Fourteen-year-old Cathreen is at a turning point: ahead of her is more of the path that has taken her to a lake at a deserted scout camp where a girl is bullied and left to drown; behind her is the dull existence she leads with her mother in a small Vancouver Island town. But long before Cathreen there is the story of the three lost stones, fallen from Lucifer’s crowna story in which her father’s family in Glastonbury has played its part. When Cathreen flees to England to find her father, she steps across a boundary into a landscape where good and evil, justice, vengeance and enduring love vie for prime place in the human heart. It is here she must make her choice.The Utopian community of Summerwood, where she finds refuge, inhabits a strange ground where contemporary events brush up against mythology, a place populated by characters who ultimately reveal themselves to be not only the rag-tag collection of lost souls they seem, but also players in stark and mysterious drama.There’s Nick, the environmentalist, armed with a dream; Merry, his friend, who holds the key to love and forgiveness in a puzzle of changed identity decades old; Galt, risen from the boghalf-monster, half human, devoted to his “Master”; and “Pam,” the blonde, buxom beach babe he has seen on TV. Comedy and tragedy take turns as Cathreen searches for her father, and her father, Jag, attempts to control the chaos he has let loose.Watching over them is Cutthroat, the cat, whose own attempt to find happiness is the engine of the tale.Like Visible Worlds, Marilyn Bowering’s acclaimed previous novel, this is a story intricately woven, a magical, multi-layered page-turner that will appeal to lovers of contemporary literary fiction and fantasy.

Cat's Pilgrimage

Bowering, Marilyn

HarperFlamingo

Award-winning writer Dennis Bock returns with an unforgettable novel about a man whose life has touched millions. In The Communist’s Daughter, the legendary Canadian doctor Norman Bethunevisionary, radical, martyrcomes vividly to life. Amidst the death and chaos of the Japanese army’s advance into the northern hills of China, Bethune composes a wrenching letter to his daughter, a small child he has never seen. Her mother, the mysterious Swede named Kajsa he abandoned in war-torn Spain, haunts him. Now, faced with imminent death, the only trained doctor in 100,000 square miles, Bethune must confront the sum of his life.
Set against the tumult of the late 1930s, when ideologies clashed in Spain and China and the world stood poised for global conflict, The Communist’s Daughter is a remarkable depiction of the moral ambiguities of war, political idealism and personal responsibility. Bock’s Bethune is a man of fierce conviction and intense, often unreasoning, loyalty; yet, in the end, will he summon the courage to confess to his daughter the true reason he left her to come to the heart of this life-and-death struggle in the hills of China?
 This is storytelling at its bestan elegant, passionate novel that unfolds against the sweep of history as the world, once again, turns towards war.

The Communist's Daughter

Bock, Dennis

Sand Hills, Saskatchewan, is a region of the prairies that is unique, an expanse of shifting sand dunes interrupted by patches of green vegetation, small lakes, and saline flats. Foreign yet familiar, Sand Hills is the extraordinarily vivid place threaded through Jacqueline Baker's highly praised first collection of short fiction, eight fresh and true stories of prairie life. Baker writes with confidence and unvarnished honesty, and like Flannery O'Connor or Bonnie Burnard, she has the rare ability to make the familiar brilliant and finely understood. Hers are universal themes of the tensionsof family life, of relationships defined by what isn't said, rather than what is, and of our connection to a past that may be real or imagined. Reading A Hard Witching is like entering a complete and perfectly detailed world with each story-worlds that are not easy to leave and even harder to forget.

A Hard Witching & Other Stories

Baker, Jacqueline

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