Set in a small town in Ireland, this amazing story is told through the eyes of a huge cast of characters. Inhabitants of the same village, they are connected in various ways to its troubles, past and present. I was drawn in immediately, as much for the stark beauty of Ryan’s language as for the story itself.

Since childhood I’ve loved looking at the night sky. Though I know little enough about astronomy, Starry Nights on Burnaby Mountain had long been on my radar. On a cool clear evening, I finally attended the event. While waiting to enter the room housing the big telescope, I looked through one of the external telescopes and saw a comet.

For some reason, I expected this book to be funny. Beyond a hilarious incident described in the opening essay, it was anything but. Also unexpectedly, it proved a page turner—not what one expects from a book of essays.

The novel opens on a murky night in Troubles era Northern Ireland. Briefly, we meet a boy who “never strays from” the familiar boundaries of “a meshed grid of streets and a couple of roads that only rarely has he followed into the city’s centre.” This child, the product of poverty, ignorance and violence, nurtures a single ambition: “The desire to be someone.”

On the surface, this simple tale relates a frail old man’s imminent separation from the beloved dog he’s no longer able to care for. From the beginning, the reader knows Bo will have to let Sixten go and will blame his son Hans for relocating the animal.

Set in homestead country near Lacombe in the first decade of the twentieth century, the story portrays a disparate group of women with one goal in common: to have homes of their own. This is an era when women had no vote and no property rights.

We meet Seamus sporting his new corduroy trousers, an innocent five-year-old Seamus who dismays his elders by asking the title question with a smile on his face. It will be a long time before true comprehension enters his little heart. “I knew Heaven was a real, physical place, and I couldn’t visit her there…she’d previously spent time in Belfast, where I could visit her, but it was made clear to me that heaven and Belfast were different in that respect and several others.”

Set in the former Greek Leper Colony of Spinalonga, a small island off the coast of Crete, this novel portrays the nature of leprosy, and how society coped with it.

In her inimitable and lighthearted style, the author of Swedish Death Cleaning, (86 when she wrote this book), brings us some of the suggestions that have helped her cope with the challenges of old age.

Sleuth and editor Susan Ryeland is back! In her third outing, her creator combines a jolly romp through a classic style mystery set in 1955 on the French Riviera with a contemporary whodunit that imperils our intrepid editor once again. Susan’s newest adventure showcases the dangerous oddity of a fictional author and reveals some seamier aspects of the publishing world as it grapples with the realities of an era dominated by huge multicultural entertainment corporations which control so much of the visual content that novelists and publishers must now contend with.

Beautifully written, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser portrays deep human flaws and dilemmas in story form. An Australian woman student originally from Sri Lanka witnesses the dogmatism, irrationality and prejudice in the academic world that surrounds her.

The discoveries of physiologist Griffith Pugh on the effects of cold and lack of oxygen on the human body were unsung in his lifetime and would likely have remained so had his daughter not been inspired to put them on record long after his death. The story of his life and work also serves to remind readers of some major upheavals and achievements of the twentieth century.

I suspect many contemporary novelists would be scandalized by the nimble flexibility of the narrator used by White in this remarkable novel. Omniscient narrators are currently out of fashion.

The quotation is from Ulysses, by Tennyson and it was in our high school English book. The year I left our small town to attend university in the city, these words symbolized the idea of seeing the wider world beyond our town, and I couldn’t wait.

This week I took Rosemary Sutcliff’s children’s version of The Odyssey out of the library, wondering if it would interest my grandchildren. As I leafed through to look at Alan Lee’s beautiful illustrations, I realized that I’d never actually read the tale, central though it is to the culture that has surrounded me all my life.

Like much of Bob Dylan’s other work, the lyrics are complex, expressing conflict between lovers, unrequited yearning for the unavailable object of love, and philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, as well as pride and self-doubt.[1]

Like the earlier books in the Malabar House series, this one has an intricate plot that must be unraveled by the delightful Persis Wadia, the newly independent India’s first woman police inspector. With those who govern the new nation already pulling in different directions, Persis manages to stop a lone young man from assassinating a hawkish politician.

“Music can scourge the heart.” The tone of this novel’s opening is poignant, almost elegiac. Showing the musician through a series of moments that echo and return and flow into her compositions, MacLaverty transports us into the heart, mind, and soul of Northern Irish composer Catherine Anne McKenna.

Asked by an audience member how long it took to produce one of her amazing paintings, she replied that she needed no preliminary drawings, and could complete a painting in 3 or 4 long days. “I am a portal,” she said. “Since the artistic expression comes through me, I know what it’s supposed to look like.”