Novel Pleasures

This is turning out to be a bumper season for Canadian fiction. The superstars are not on this year’s list—Atwood, Munro, Ondaatje, Vanderhaege—but many of our most solid prose artists, as well as many promising rookie voices, are on display in the stores with new novels and story collections. Regular LRC readers will have seen, or will see in the coming months, in these pages full-scale reviews of works by Mark Anthony Jarman, Mary Swan, Libby Creelman, Joseph Boyden, David Bergen, Donna Morrissey, Joan Barfoot, Fred Stenson, Nino Ricci, Joan Thomas, Patrick Lane, Kenneth J. Harvey and Josef Škvorecký.

That’s a rich list, but it is not complete. There are many more fiction titles worth discussing this season, and we simply do not have room for them all. So in the run-up to the Christmas season, we have decided to give our readers just a short taste (more descriptive than critical given the space constraints) of ten more Canadian novels that might appeal to you or...