Novels Now

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
I would guess that the Man Booker judges committee this year all like the same kind of book: wry commentary on society, first person narrative, confessional story, with lots of dark humor. The White Tiger had the same tone and feel to me as A Fraction of the Whole […]

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson
I believe Anne fans have been somewhat leery of this book. To attempt to write the before story, based on the small tidbits of her past that Anne let slip, was a huge undertaking for Wilson. People who love Anne would want the story to be true to LM Montgomery’s […]

Popularity: 19% [?]

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The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
Summerscale has written a very interesting book about the history of detectives, real and fictional, as well as investigating a true murder that scandalized Victorian England in 1860. The subtitle is “A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victoria Detective.”
The murder was of three year old […]

Popularity: 13% [?]

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A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
I first heard of this big ole book when bookfool mentioned it, then kookiejar loved it. It’s big in size (531 pages) and ambition. Toltz covers a lot of material here, and I’ll try to summarize a bit.
Jasper Dean is writing his family’s colourful history in Australia, […]

Popularity: 15% [?]

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Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
My son just said to me, “Didn’t you just start that book yesterday?” Always the sign of a good book, one that I just race through. I’ve been reading some good reviews of this one in the Southern Reading Challenge. It’s a classic southern novel, tackling racist life in Mississippi just after […]

Popularity: 32% [?]

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A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
In 1988, a plane carrying the President of Pakistan crashed, killing the President - military dictator General Zia, some generals, and the American Ambassador, Arnold Raphel. This book looks at what may have caused the crash and the death of the General Zia.
I had to look up at […]

Popularity: 28% [?]

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written by Steven Galloway
How do I remember so little about the war in Sarajevo? Yugoslavia broke apart after the Cold War, and I know there were lots of civil wars and the Canadian Peace Keepers were in Bosnia during the 1990s. I guess it’s the same sort of awareness in Darfur now; there is something […]

Popularity: 30% [?]

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by Sadie Jones 
The novel opens in 1957 with Lewis’ return home after a stay in prison. We quickly flashback to when he was ten and his father was returning from the war, 1945 , to the small village outside London and follow poor Lewis’s life up until his incarceration. The last third of the book rejoins […]

Popularity: 29% [?]

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Paul Quarrington has been in the news lately (in Canada) as the author of the winning Canada Reads book, King Leary. I haven’t read it yet, but when I got the opportunity to read his latest book, released March 11, 2008, I jumped.
And then I laughed my way through this book. Phil McQuigge is a […]

Popularity: 44% [?]

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The End of East by Jen Sookfong Lee
Vancouver’s Chinatown is the setting of this family history chronicling Sammy Chan’s ancestors. The novel starts with Sammy’s return to her mother’s house, but the family’s story begins with the immigration of Seid Quan from China. I don’t think Canada has much to be proud about for its […]

Popularity: 33% [?]

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