| Note from Editor Editor's Note
by Olga Stein
Season's Greetings dear reader from everyone at Books in Canada.We hope the new year brings more of the delights you're accustomed to, as well as a host of new ones. Since books play such a joyful part in everyday life, we hope to continue guiding you to many of the finest works published in Canada, while keeping you in touch with scores of beloved authors from other parts of the world.
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| | Book Review Air-Lifted by Magic
by Heather Birrell
There is something to be said for starting a story up in the air. The thrilling in-between of travel is often accompanied by a freedom and licentiousness intensified by the sensation of being aloft, above-it-all. In A Fine Passage, France Daigle uses this open-bordered "airiness" to explore the ruminations and illuminations of a group of seemingly unconnected strangers as they travel, by plane, to various destinations, leaving behind personal commitments and conundrums.
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| | Book Review Accruing Life Bit by Bit
by Steven W. Beattie
In the years since Tolstoy penned his masterpiece, Anna Karenina, his famous aphorism about unhappy families has served as a springboard for novelists of all backgrounds and nationalities to examine the seemingly endless ways fathers and sons, mothers and daughters can hurt, harry, and abuse one another.
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|  | Sylvia Plath, Poems
by Selected by Ted Hughes
Faber and Faber
72 pages $9.99 paper
ISBN: 0571203582
|  | Ted Hughes, Poems
by Selected by Simon Armitage
Faber and Faber
138 pages $9.99 paper
ISBN: 0571203639
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Book Review Plath and Hughes: A Special Case Indeed
by Robert Moore
With the revelation of Ted Hughes's affair with Assia Wevill in the fall of 1962, Sylvia Plath's marriage of six years to Hughes all but legally ended, and with considerable bitterness on Plath's side.
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| | Book Review The Super Feminine Lesbian
by Joy Parks
It's a bright September afternoon in 1981. I'm barely 21 and I'm climbing the five dank and shadowy flights of stairs that lead to The Body Politic's Duncan Street offices. I'm wearing what I consider appropriate for a professional meeting: my best black skirt, black patterned hose, black patent leather pumps and a creamy pink angora sweater that was well worth the many Campbell's tomato soup and cracker suppers its purchase demanded.
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| | Book Review The Point of No Return
by David Colterjohn
Around a hundred years ago, residents on a number of Pacific islands decided to decorate their gardens with giant land snails imported from Africa. Though pleasing to the eye, the introduced species quickly multiplied out of control and began to attack crops and even native snail species. By the mid-1950s, it had become so ubiquitous a pest that something had to be done.
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|  | Atonement
by Ian McEwan
Knopf Canada
371 pages $34.95 Cloth
ISBN: 0676974554
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Book Review Giller Prize Winner, The Polished Hoe
by Nancy Wigston
When does a novel become a work of art? Austin Clarke's latest novel, The Polished Hoe, is that rare creation that soars above the earth to become more than the sum of its parts. Clarke, a poet, novelist, memoirist, and teacher, raised in Barbados and a long time resident of Toronto, has explored the unbreakable, unbearable connection between here and there, present and pastùthe universal immigrant's taleùin complex and engaging ways before, notably in his 1997 novel, The Origin of Waves
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| | Book Review Fighting to Surrender
by Cindy MacKenzie
Six years since his highly acclaimed award-winning novel, The Englishman's Boy, Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing hits the presses and readers are running to their bookstores in eager anticipation of a long-awaited reading experience.
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| | Book Review "Same Character and Same Character Trait"
by Jack Illingworth
All of Jacques Poulin's novels are the same; all of them are different. This critical truism has long been applied to the works of this distinguished QuTbecois novelist and translator, for all of his novels are stories of detached, literate, wandering men, who travel across North America, meet their ideal feminine companion, while working through a socially-relevant problem.
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| | Book Review Franzen, Alone and Appealing
by Alex Boyd
In How To Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen begins with a title that, were it not for the addition of the word Essays, would sound like some kind of guide to anti-social behaviour. But what Franzen wants is to be out of step in a world where few people are asking questions, where we've given the cultural authority over to passive mediums like television. He isn't comfortable with a digital age that allows access to a great deal while sacrificing depth, or "instead of wisdom, data.
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| | Book Review Field Notes on Four Years of Collecting the Works of Ted Hughes
by Michael Harris
Biographies, even the best of them (cf. Richard Holmes' recent two-volume Coleridge), tend to scratch a strange itch on the part of the literarily-bent, metronoming between offerings of intellectual revelation and rank prurience. But what distinguishes any writer, after all, is the long-term usefulness of the work itself. What a relief we know so little about the life of Shakespeareùand so endlessly much about what he wrote.
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| | Book Review Literature
by Clara Thomas
It is 35 years, ONLY 35 years, since Norah Story edited the first Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature which, together with The Literary History of Canada was a landmark celebratory volume for Canada's Centennial year. Now, thanks to the continuing dedication, devotion and expertise of William Toye, already acknowledged in the Story volume as "bearing a tremendous burden" in its production, we have had two editions and this Concise Companion devoted to Canadian Literature alone.
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| | Book Review A Pick of Picture Books by Jeffrey Canton
by Jeffrey Canton
The Colour of Home, Mary Hoffman, Illustrated by Karin Littlewood
Best known for her Amazing Grace series, British author Mary Hoffman has created a stunning picture book that focuses on children's perception of war. A new refugee from war torn Somalia, Hassan finds his new English home dull and grey and colourless. He has no friends and doesn't understand English.
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|  | The Sweeter Life
by Tim Wynveen
Random House
426 pages $34.95 cloth
ISBN: 0679311572
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Book Review A Death in The Family
by Donna Nurse
Any one of a dozen characters in Tim Wynveen's latest novel, The Sweeter Life, is intriguing enough to sustain a book of their own. There is Ruby Mitchell the loving farm wife who takes in her niece and two nephewsùIsabel, Hank and Cyrus Owenùafter their parents are killed in a car accident
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| | Book Review Chinese Cuisine plus Culture and History
by Byron Ayanoglu
A photographer friend, who shares my passion for Chinese food, pulls a rather nifty move when ordering in Chinatown restaurants. He insists on laboriously copying the menu's Chinese-character designations of our choices, in order to impress the chef and maybe score extra shrimps or larger portions of noodles.
He has good visual grasp, and reproduces the characters accurately enough to express the desires of our appetite, without in the least knowing what he is writing
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|  | Baudolino
by Umberto Eco
Harcourt
528 pages $40 cloth
ISBN: 0151006903
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Book Review Seeking Prester John: Umberto Eco and His Messenger
by David Solway
"The problem," said Eco in a lecture delivered at Brown University a few years back, "is not to keep everyone a prisoner of his own ghettoùit is to allow everyone to also understand other experiences." Eco was expounding on his celebrated Encyclomedia program, a vast, semiotically-inspired cross-referencing of different cultures, periods, ideologies and religions, and in general the many different ways of constructing or scripting reality in a parallel series of lateral worlds.
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|  | The Clarinet Polka
by Keith Maillard
Thomas Allan Publishers
497 pages $32.95 cloth
ISBN: 0887621007
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Book Review Laugh, Cry, and Laugh Again
by K. Gordon Neufeld
A sprightly and exhilarating polka will nearly always put a crowd in high spirits, but it takes a really hot polka band to keep a crowd on its feet all through the long, laughing night. Even so, most bands know that at some point they must play a slow, sentimental waltz, so that young (and old) lovers can hold each other close and whisper mushy things.
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| | Book Review The Evolving Murakami
by Kevin Chong
In a sense, Haruki Murakami is like an apartment-hopping twenty-something who brings his CD collection, his Blow Up movie poster, and mini-fridge to each new address. While from novel to novel, he incorporates such disparate forms as hardboiled detective fiction (A Wild Sheep Chase), cyberpunk (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World), and bildungsroman (Norwegian Wood), he trucks his sensibility and tastes to every one of them.
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| | Book Review Mostly Harmless
by Jeremy Lott
A few years ago, I attended a course on the wisdom books of the Bible. It was one of those gorgeous new British Columbia spring days that turns normal powers of concentration to mush, and class, consequently, was not going well.
The professor was struggling to keep our attention and to avoid being diverted down too many unproductive rabbit trails. The students, in turn, kept trying to throw him off of the prepared lesson.
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|  | Souvenir of Canada
by Douglas Coupland
Douglas & McIntyre
144 pages $26.95 paper
ISBN: 1550549170
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Book Review Souvenir of Coupland
by Cynthia Sugars
There's something about the spectacle of Douglas Coupland proclaiming his love for Canada that is depressing. Perhaps it's because Coupland's particular brand of dummied-down cynicism, made famous in his novel Generation X, doesn't lend itself to anything remotely approaching insightful reflection, patriotic or otherwise. Or is it rather that Coupland just can't help being Coupland . . . and loving every minute of it
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| | Book Review Unflinching Truthteller: New Stories by Sharon Butala
by K. Gordon Neufeld
Sharon Butala is well known for her autobiographical writings about her life on a prairie ranch, and her growing enchantment with the semi-arid lands of Saskatchewan near the Cypress Hills where she has lived for more than 25 years.
In particular, her wise and thoughtful memoir, The Perfection of the Morning, became a surprise best-seller and was nominated for the Governor-General's Award
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| | Book Review A Community in Saskatchewan
by Allan Safarik
Warren Cariou's Lake of the Prairies is a beautifully written memoir about time and place and the nostalgia of a childhood growing up on the edge of the northern prairie in the parklandùa relatively uncelebrated area of Saskatchewan that is mostly dense forests, muskeg, rocky outcrops, marshes and lakes. Cariou's maternal grandparents were immigrants who came to the harsh country near Meadow Lake and carved out pasture from the raw treed land.
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| | Book Review Retraipsing Journeys Through Labrador
by David Berry
In 1903, New York journalist Leonidas Hubbard, his lawyer companion, Dillon Wallace, and a Native guide, George Elson, set out from Northwest River near modern-day Goose Bay to explore the unmapped Labrador interior. Their goal was the shores of Ungava Bay, nearly 600 miles to the northûûa formidable journey through difficult terrain in one of the least-known areas in North America. But the adventure soon turned to disaster when they chose the wrong river.
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| | Book Review Gift Books û Editor's Pick
by Olga Stein
Aviation/History
Given the book's title, a qualification at the outset is in order. It would have been more appropriate to call it "An Illustrated History of Aviation in Canada" since few of the aircraft actually originated in Canada. Generally speaking, the planes were designed either in Europe or the US for commercial or military use and were either assembled in Canada or produced on the basis of an imported template
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| | Book Review Gift Books û Editor's Pick
by Olga Stein
Music/Culture
Music aficionados or those who cherish the experience of a night on the town which includes the pleasures of listening to a first-rate symphony orchestra, couldn't but welcome this book on the near-eighty-year-history of one of the finest orchestras in North America, a cornerstone in the cultural life of Toronto, one of Canada's brightest cities.
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| | Book Review Theatre by Keith Garebian
by Keith Garebian
EL PASO by Michael Miller
Directed by Philip Akin
Opened at the Factory Theatre
October 4, 2002.
EL PASO overflows with Afro-American family rage but it is not a raging polemic. It is about the seething anger, bitterness, and hatred of family members, and it is more than this. It is about choices and their consequences, of dreams and their burdens. It is a raw, rough play, relentless in its menacing rhetoric, and you would need a heart of stone not to be affected by its power.
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| | Book Review A Good but Incomplete Canvas
by David M. Mitchell
On the 5th of March, 1913, an exhibition of nine Canadian painters opened at the MacDowell Club in New York. Composed of a young, progressive element that included Lawren Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald, and representatives from the older, more conservative generation, such as Wyly Grier and William Brymner, it had little or no impact
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|  | Editor
by Max Hastings
Macmillan
398 pages $44 cloth
ISBN: 0333908376
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Book Review Inside the British Newspaper Business
by Christopher Ondaatje
In May 1985, following a tip-off from Andrew Knight, then editor of The Economist, a series of events led to an entrapment when the young Canadian financier Conrad Black made an investment of ú10 million for a 14 per cent stake in the Daily Telegraph. Previously, the newspaper had been 96.9 per cent owned by the Daily Telegraph Newspaper Trust, which was set up by the Lords Hartwell and Camrose (the Berry family).
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| | Book Review Short Story Games: Writers versus Readers
by Steven Laird
"We do not want to make our work more 'accessible'ùrepellent wordùrather, we need to teach readers how to read us better.."
This somewhat antagonistic quote on the cover of The New Quarterly's Wild Writers We Have Known: A Celebration of the Canadian Short Story and Story Writers, is from John Metcalf's opening address to a three-day symposium that took place as part of Academy Stratford in September, 2000.
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| | Book Review Looking for Irish Blood
by Ryan Bigge
Volume XXI of The New Quarterly (published in Winter of 2002) is devoted to Wild Writers We Have Known, a three-day symposium on the English Canadian short story, held in Stratford in September of 2000. These proceedings were so rich in result, they required a double issue of The New Quarterly to document and describe them. And it is here where you will find the transcription of a lecture given by Douglas Glover entitled "How to Read a Mark Jarman Story.
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| | Book Review Sailing On The Eve of a Storm Overseas
by Derek Lundy
In the austral winter of 1905, a series of powerful, malignant storms roared west through the Drake Passage between Cape Horn and Antarctica, destroying scores of square-rigged sailing ships and killing hundreds of seamen. Sometimes, crews, or parts of them, were saved. Some ships hobbled into nearby ports for resuscitation
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| | Book Review Our Flying Heroes
by Allan Safarik
These two volumes are welcome additions to the Canadian aviation canon, a subject that is always interesting and usually dominated by extraordinary characters with unlimited energy and indefatigable constitutions.
In the first, Grounded In Eire, Ralph Keefer recreates the story left by his late father, R.G.C. (Bob) Keefer, DFC, a Canadian pilot who flew eighty-eight missions as a Royal Air Force pilot during the Second World War.
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| | Book Review So, Who's Perfect!
by Nathan Whitlock
Zadie Smith's first book, White Teeth, published to international acclaim two years ago, was a sprawling, multigenerational, multicultural, lively, and frequently brilliant comic novel about modern London. The novel began with a bold stride, began to stumble about midway through, then fell flat on its face at the end. I read the first half of that novel grinding my teeth with envy. In Archie Jones, the despairing yob ("A man whose pleasures were English breakfasts and DIY.
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| | Book Review Spies on Campus
by Martin Loney
Spying on Canadian students and faculty has a long history, going back, according to Hewitt's well-researched study, to the First World War. What is striking is the ability of the RCMP to continue to secure significant resources for surveillance independently of any evidence of widespread subversion or the successful targeting of universities by hostile foreign powers. The political landscape shifted dramatically in the period Hewitt studied but throughout the RCMP stayed the course.
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| | Interviews Projecting Katherine Mansfield
by Laura Ferri
This conversation took place at Bissel House, St. George campus, University of Toronto, on 28th November 2001, with questions sent by Mary CondT, from London, UK, which were read by Laura Ferri.
Laura Ferri: Mary CondF heard that I was going to come to Canada and so the idea came up that she might send questionsùwhich she could have sent you directly, of course, but this way we have created an opportunity for me to see you again.
Janice Kulyk Keefer: Which is lovely!
L.
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| | Prose/Poetry Poetry
by Alex Boyd
Poems for the Twenty-First Century by Deborah Eibel makes note of the switch from one century to another right at the beginning of the book in a couple of poems, including "The Twenty First Century".
The Twenty-first Century
Has just begun.
Every one wants to control it.
Any one can.
The Twenty-first Century
Has just begun.
Every one thinks
He has invented it.
What is striking in these lines is the lack of emotional tone.
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|  | Hypothesis
by John Barton
House of Anansi Press
120 pages $16.95 paper
ISBN: 0887845584
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Prose/Poetry Satisfying Sprawl and Commendable Scope
by Ethan Paquin
Completing John Barton's Hypothesis, one's mouth is left agape at the sheer ambition of the writer in this, his eighth book of poetry. Natural terrain becomes metaphor for physical terrain; exploration and the road trip become allegory for sexuality, every roadway and winding North American canyon reminiscent of engorged capillaries, firing synapses, and confused twisting emotions.
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| | Prose/Poetry The Book of Steve
by Elise Partridge
1.
Scene from a romance: rambling through the wood,
suddenly I stumble across a giant.
"Are you a creature of good?" You nod.
Together we adventure to the next scene.
2.
The kitten that followed you home one day û-
how did it scent your benevolence?
Tentative shadow glimpsed through the screen,
shyly at dusk it would slip from the curb,
ears radaring forward when it caught your tone,
nuzzling your gentling fingertips.
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| | Up Front Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Bestsellers Lists
* Stats based on period from October 16 through November 25
Top 50 Bestselling Fiction
1 Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Vintage Canada, Paperback)
2 Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Last Crossing (McClelland & Stewart, Hardcover)
3 Wayne Johnston, The Navigator of New York (Knopf Canada, Hardcover)
4 Austin Clarke, The Polished Hoe (Thomas Allen, Hardcover)
5 Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (McClelland & Stewart, Hardcover)
6 Carol Shields, Unless (Random House Canada, Hardcover)
7 Alice Sebold,
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|  | Tent of Blue
by Rachel Preston
Goose Lane Editions
308 pages $22.95 paper
ISBN: 0864923422
|  | The Feather Bed
by John Miller
Simon & Pierre Fiction
352 pages $21.99 paper
ISBN: 1550024019
|  | Translations: Aistreann
by Tammy Armstrong
Coteau Books
369 pages $18.95 paper
ISBN: 1550502034
| |  | Final Season
by Wayne Arthurson
Thistledown Press
253 pages $18.95 paper
ISBN: 1894345487
|  | The Wrong Madonna
by Britt Holstrom
Cormorant Books
399 pages $22.95 paper
ISBN: 1896951368
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First Novels First Novels
by W.P Kinsella
Cumberland, by Michael V. Smith (Cormorant Books, $22.95, 293 pages, ISBN: 1896951368). Smith is another of the many fine graduates of the UBC Writing Program, and in Cumberland gives a clear look at a group of well-defined characters in a dying industrial town in Ontario. Ernest is 50ish and divorced. He has just lost his long-time job at a mill because it closed down. Ernest is a loner who drinks too much and has a sexual identity problem.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Heather Finley
Fiction
Music of a Life is simple story but one that reveals much about a time and place in the past. Andren Makine's novella begins with a scene depicting modern-day Russia's inefficiency: a station full of people waiting for a train that may be days late. Among those waiting are a prostitute, two soldiers, a young mother, and a snoozing old man.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Sarah Rosenfeld
Analyse Yourself by teen expert Karyn Gordon is more of a self-help book for teens, male or female, though the issues discussed in the book like dieting and overeating seem geared to young adolescent women in particular. Gordon asks a younger demographic to take a hard educational look in order to better their attitudes toward their friends, parents and themselves
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Angela K. Narth
Fiction
Fans who have been eagerly awaiting the paperback release of Elizabeth George's eleventh novel, A Traitor to Memory will not be too disappointed. Well-developed characters and crisp, clear dialogue punctuate the solid story line in the skillful style George fans have come to expect.
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| | Children's Books Children's Books
by Karen Butcher
Short story lovers rejoice! If the recent spate of short story anthologies is any indication, the genre is experiencing a revival. Though brief enough to be read in one sitting, the short storyùif done well, is a complex narrative and in many ways more challenging to write than the novel. To amass twelve well-crafted stories by a single author is an impressive feat indeed
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| | Children's Books Children's Books
by Olga Stein
Amoving, beautifully illustrated story for children six to 10 years of age. Young Meg has recently immigrated to Canada from the Caribbean. Finding it painful to adjust to her new, utterly different way of life in a large city, she withdraws into herself and into her room in the apartment she shares with her little brother and parents. She refuses to play outdoors even when invited by Jenny, her neighbor from down the hall. Winter comes and with it snow and cold
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| | Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Congratulations to this year's GG winners Martha Brooks for her novel, True Confessions of a Heartless Girl, and Wallace Edwards for his illustrations to his imaginative alphabet book, Alphabeasts.
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|  | The Lottery
by Beth Goobie
Orca Book Publishers
266 pages $19.95 cloth
ISBN: 1551432382
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Gillian Chan
The cruelty of Adolescents towards each other has long been a staple in the books written for young adultsùRobert Cormier's contemporary classic, The Chocolate War, is one such book that immediately springs to mind. Aptly so, as Beth Goobie's fantastic new book The Lottery definitely pays homage to it, both in theme and with the knowing little detail of having one of the minor characters reading the book just he himself is about to be victimized.
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| | Children's Books Children's Books
by Julie Glazier
Linda Holeman's respect for her readers shines through her writing. Her latest novel, Search of the Moon King's Daughter, is a welcome addition to the outstanding list of books she has written for young people, including Promise Song and Raspberry House Blues.
Holeman has returned to the genre of historical fiction in this novel, setting it in industrial England in the mid 1800s.
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