Quill and Quire Fall Preview 2011

By quillandquire

Quill & Quire, Canada’s magazine of book news and reviews, offers a sneak peek at fall 2011’s top fiction, non-fiction, children’s and international titles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: quillandquire
• Release date: Sep 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466089297

quillandquire

Quill & Quire is Canada's magazine of book news and reviews. Visit us at our website quillandquire.com.

Book preview

Introduction

The first half of 2011 was packed with big books from marquee names, but the fall holds no shortage of important new releases. Novels from Michael Ondaatje, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Marina Endicott are on the way, along with Johanna Skibsrud’s first collection of stories and a quirky collaboration between Douglas Coupland and Graham Roumieu. Former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson has a new work of non-fiction, as do Charlotte Gill, Margaret Atwood, and David Adams Richards. On the kids’ side, there are new books from Deborah Ellis, Marie-Louise Gay, and Andrea Beck. And looking beyond our borders, we can expect Jeffery Eugenides’ highly anticipated new novel, along with books by A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, and Joan Didion.

QUILL & QUIRE FALL PREVIEW

STEVEN W. BEATTIE

STUART WOODS

NATHAN WHITLOCK

JASON SPENCER

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Quill & Quire 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Canadian Fiction (Poetry and Graphica)

Canadian Non - Fiction

Books for Young People

International Books

CANADIAN FICTION

(Poetry and Graphica)

Compiled by: Steven W. Beattie

Novels

One of the most anticipated releases of the fall season is surely the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Michael Ondaatje, his first since 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award winner Divisadero. Set in the early 1950s, The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart, $32 cl., Aug.) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy crossing the Indian Ocean on a liner bound for England, and the mysterious prisoner shackled on board. Also from M&S is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first novel in eight years. Set in the late 19th-century Canadian and American West, A Good Man ($32.99 cl., Sept.) is the third book in a loose trilogy that also includes The Last Crossing (2003) and The Englishman’s Boy, which won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award. A third GG winner has a new novel out this season: David Gilmour, who won in 2005 for his previous novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China. Gilmour returns with The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen Publishers, $26.95 cl., Sept.), the story of a man who revisits traumatic and life-changing incidents from his past. Marina Endicott follows up her Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted 2008 novel Good to a Fault with The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), about three sisters who become vaudeville singers following the death of their father. -Acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys returns with an historical novel set in France during the Napoleonic period. The Reinvention of Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is about a French journalist whose affair with Victor Hugo’s wife causes a scandal (as it might be expected to do).

Brian Francis’s debut novel, Fruit, was a runner-up in the 2009 edition of CBC’s battle of the books, Canada Reads. His second novel, Natural Order (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., Aug.), tells the story of a mother who is forced to confront the secrets she has kept about her son when her carefully constructed life is overturned by a startling revelation. Kevin Chong returns to fiction with his first novel in a decade. Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95 pa., Sept.) follows an Asian--Canadian slacker in Vancouver whose incipient modelling career is derailed by the death of his father and the sudden departure of his fiancée.

Requiem (HarperCollins Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), the third novel from Frances Itani, is about a Japanese-Canadian who embarks upon a cross-country journey of discovery following the death of his wife. Anita Rau Badami follows her best-selling novels Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk with Tell It to the Trees (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), about the Dharma family – the authoritarian Vikram, the gourmand Suman, and the old storyteller Akka. When the Dharma’s tenant, Anu, turns up dead on their doorstep, the family’s long-buried secrets begin to boil over. Gayla Reid