Graham Harley

His mum’s just kicked the bucket in Blighty and his wife’s bonking a painter in Ottawa, so grouchy old Will Prentice, adman extraordinaire, figures that after ma’s funeral and with no pressing reason to return to Canada, he might as well spend some time travelling about England. Will is an ex-pat who’s having a mid-life crisis about whether he truly belongs in…

The four central characters in Corey Redekop’s invigorating first novel are bibliognostic bibliophiles, bibliomaniacal and bibliophagic, who work for a bibliopole and indulge in biblioclasm. They probably read the LRC. They labour in the mega-bookstore READ (pronounced both “reed” and “red,” possibly depending on whether you are going in or coming out), an Indigo/Chapters warehouse of soulless commercialism in Winnipeg in which the operative principle is not the value of books but the sale of…

Whether recreating belle époque France in Atmosphères Apollinaire, Marco Polo’s travels in The Lion of Venice, the Tibet of a hundred years ago in Invading Tibet, or Spain’s collapse into civil war in Slow Lightning, Mark Frutkin characteristically displays an astringently lyrical narrative…