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Maylin Scott's Fall 2009 Picks.
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Fiction
Generation A
by Douglas Coupland
Random House Canada | Fiction - 978-0-307-35772-4 - $32.95 | September 2009
In the near future bees are extinct — until one autumn when five people are stung in different places around the world. This shared experience unites them in a way they never could have imagined. Coupland just gets better and better - he has his finger on the pulse of all of society’s neuroses, in this case, the disappearance of the bees and society’s overuse of the internet and blackberries. Great to recommend to teens as well or to any book club reading Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. Both authors cover the same anxieties - just in very different ways.
Her Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger
Knopf Canada | Fiction - 978-0-307-39745-4 - $34.95 | October 2009
A Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore
Bond Street Books | Fiction -978-0-385-66824-8 - $29.95 | September 2009
Set just after the events of September 2001, it is a story about Tassie Keltjin, a twenty-year-old making her way in a new world and coming of age. Tassie has come to a university town, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, and Simone de Beauvoir. In between semesters, she takes a part-time job as a nanny for a family that seems mysterious and glamorous to her and begins to care for, and protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds, she is drawn even deeper into the world of the child and her hovering parents, and her own life back home becomes alien to her. As life reveals itself dramatically and shockingly, Tassie finds herself forever changed — less the person she once was, and more and more the stranger she feels herself to be. This was a harrowing and unforgettable read. Absolutely terrific writing.
In the Falling Snow
by Caryl Phillips
Knopf U.S. | Fiction - 978-0-307-27256-0 - $32.00 | September 2009
A Week in December
by Sebastian Faulks
Hutchinson | Fiction - 978-0-09-179445-3 - $34.95 - October 2009
Structured like a thriller, this novel takes place over the course of a single week at the end of 2008. The central anti-hero, John Veals, is a shadily successful and boundlessly ambitious Dickensian character who is trading billions. His influence encompass newspaper columnists, MPs, businessmen, footballers, a female tube driver, a Scottish convert to Islam, a disaffected teenager, and a care worker. The perfect novel for these economically troubled times or for fans of Ian McEwan’s Saturday.
Summertime
by J.M. Coetzee
Harvill Secker | Fiction - 978-1-84655-318-9 - $32.00 | September 2009
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972–1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Simply a masterpiece and so much fun to read. It would make a great bookclub pick as it really explores the fine line between biography/fiction. Is Coetzee just having fun, or thwarting future biographers? On the shortlist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
Memories of the Future
by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, trans. by Joanne Turnbull
NYRB Classics | Fiction - 978-1-59017-319-0 - $18.95 | October 2009
Written in So viet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn’t join it as there’s no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future. So clever and original.
The True Deceiver
by Tove Jansson, trans. by Thomas Teal
NYRB Classics | Fiction | 978-1-59017-329-9 | $18.95 | December 2009
Deception–the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others –is the subject of The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives in a room with her simple teenaged brother and a dog she never bothered to name. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, is a respected and easygoing, if aloof, member of society who lives alone in her family mansion. When Anna needs someone to help around the house, Katri eagerly volunteers. It’s not long before she and her brother have moved into the mansion and taken charge of just about every aspect of Anna’s life and livelihood. As the season becomes increasingly oppressive, the two women find themselves engaged in a confrontation that will gradually strip away their cherished illusions. For readers who loved the delicious tension in Zoe Heller’s Notes From a Scandal.
The Quickening Maze
by Adam Foulds
Vintage Canada | Fiction | 978-0-307-39910-6 | $19.95
| November 2009
Based on real events in 1840, Foulds's compelling tale centres on the life of the great nature poet John Clare. After years spent struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Asylum, built within Epping Forest. At the same time, the young Alfred Tennyson moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar yet charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For fans of The Hours, In Zodiac Light or Pat Barker’s Ghost Road Trilogy. Also for fans of Jane Campion’s movie Bright Star.
Non-Fiction
The Music Room
by William Fiennes
Random House Canada | Memoir | 978-0-307-35786-1 - $29.95 | August 2009
Most of us have dreamed of living in a castle. William Fiennes grew up in one. The house was alive with secrets and history, its vaulted passageways, Great Hall and extensive grounds the setting for theatrical presentations, local fairs and international film shoots. Equally fascinating to young Will was his eldest brother Richard, who suffered from disabling epilepsy. This is a song of home, of an adored and sometimes feared brother and of the miracle of consciousness. A charming and nostalgic look at childhood.
Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life
by Michael Greenberg
Other Press - Biography and Autobiography | 978-1-59051-341-5 | $24.95 | September 2009
From the author of the acclaimed memoir Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg regales us with his wry and vivid take on the life of a writer of little means trying to practice his craft or simply stay alive. He finds himself doctoring doomed movie scripts; selling cosmetics from an ironing board in front of a women's department store; writing about golf, a game he has never played; and botching his debut as a waiter in a posh restaurant. Hilarious and bittersweet, Greenberg's stories invite us into a world where the familial, the literary, the tragic and the mundane not only speak to one another, but deeply enjoy the exchange.
Talking About Detective Fiction
by P.D. James
Knopf Canada | Literary Criticism & Collections - Mystery & Detective Fiction; Fiction - Mystery & Detective |978-0-307-39880-2 | $29.95 | December 2009
A personal, lively and illuminating exploration of “the human appetite for mystery and mayhem” and those writers who have satisfied it. Here is the perfect marriage of author and subject: essential for every lover of detective fiction. This is not only a primer for the uninitiated but a great resource as well for the seasoned detective fan; I guarantee you’ll be making notes on some of the books and writers that James admires but who have sadly lapsed out of print, as well as appreciating the masters. James writes with great love and respect for the craft. Just a wonderful read.
