Book club buys
We're making your holiday shopping even easier: To order the featured books from Amazon.ca, click on the book titles!
Books for your book club pals (so you can borrow):
Valmiki’s Daughter (Anansi, $30) by Shani Mootoo plunges into the public and private lives of a successful, yet complacent Trinidadian doctor and his family. At age seven, Valmiki’s youngest daughter witnesses her father’s adultery, yet the facade of propriety must not crack. Now a Canadian, Mootoo was raised in Trinidad and has the ability to paint both landscapes and cityscapes, and the internal anguish of people who love one another but struggle with sexuality, race and class clashes. A stunner.
A Man Booker finalist, Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago, $36) is about Vivien — “brought up to be a mouse” by traumatized Hungarian refugee parents — and her discovery of a reprobate uncle denounced by her family. Grant’s dialogue is brilliant, as is her portrayal of the racial tensions in 1970s London. Also available in paperback.
Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (Viking Canada, $32) by Edeet Ravel is a sweetly compelling coming-of-age story set in Jewish Montreal, also in the early ’70s, where the children of three very different families, haunted by the memories and scars of the Holocaust — referred to only as “there” — find their way through adolescence.
Good to a Fault (Freehand Books, $26) by Marina Endicott, a Giller finalist, asks: What does it take and mean to be a really good person? Clara Purdy is “single, childless of course…fortyish…and not in good spirits….” Her response to an accident she causes is to virtually adopt an entire family, complete with an infant and two small children, their very ill mother and a kleptomaniac granny. Set in suburban Saskatoon, and saved from earnestness by lovely, sharp writing, Good to a Fault has strong characters and a dancing plot line.
Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories are jagged slabs of granite upon which are etched the records of hard lives in hard times on an unforgiving landscape. Fine Just the Way It Is (Scribner, $30), the third volume set in the U.S. state, contains nine parables in which eccentric characters, with names like Mellowhorn and Forkenbrock, Mizpah Fur and Verla Fipps, try to make things work. Oddly funny, macabre deaths, intimate domestic details and Proulx’s prose make the strangeness worth the journey.
