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Top Fiction
#1. 
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The Flying Troutmans
By Miriam Toews
A
novel that is at once hilarious and heartrending,The Flying Troutmansis
about a family on the verge of spinning off its axles and a road trip
that just may keep it together. When Hattie receives an SOS call in
Paris from her eleven-year-old niece, the decision to return to Canada
is slam-dunk easy, because shes just been dumped by her boyfriend. But
when she arrives back, her sister, Min, is on her way to the
psychiatric ward, and Hattie is left to take care of Mins children,
Thebes and Logan. When she realizes that this may become a permanent
arrangement, Hattie hatches a plan. Without much more than an old
address to go on, the three of them set off on a wild road trip to find
the kids long-lost father.
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#2. 
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Anathem
By Neal Stephenson
Since
childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old
monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and
mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the
illiterate, irrational, unpredictable 'saecular' world, an endless
landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles
of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate
change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it
is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an
impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Rax and his friends, mentors,
and teachers are summoned forth without warning into the unknown.
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#3. 
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The Gargoyle
By Andrew Davidson
An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell
and transcends the boundaries of time. On a burn ward, a man lies
between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life
would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various
inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel
walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired, schizophrenic sculptress
on the lam from the psych ward upstairs, who insists that she knows him
that she has known him, in fact, for seven hundred years. She remembers
vividly when they met, in another hospital ward at a convent in
medieval Germany, when she was a nun and he was a wounded mercenary
left to die. If he has forgotten this, he is not to worry: she will
prove it to him. And so Marianne Engel begins to tell him their story,
carving away his disbelief and slowly drawing him into the orbit and
power of a word hed never uttered: love. |
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#4. 
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Doors Open
By Ian Rankin
Set in a very different Edinburgh to that inhabited by DI John Rebus,
this new thriller will show a whole new side to Ian Rankin.With echoes
of OCEAN'S 11 and THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, this novel centres on the
glamorous uber-world of the Scottish capital. Mike Mackenzie is a
self-made man with too much time on his hands and a bit of the devil in
his soul. He is looking for something to liven up the days and settles
on a plot to rip-off one of the most high-profile targets in the
capital - the National Gallery of Scotland.So, together with two close
friends from the art world, he devises a plan to a lift some of the
most valuable artwork around. But of course, the real trick is to rob
the place for all its worth whilst persuading the world that no crime
was ever committed... |
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#5. 
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Cellist Of Sarajevo
By Steven Galloway
This
brilliant novel with universal resonance tells the story of three
people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of
desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in
their midst. One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two
people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit
in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinonis Adagio once a
day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created
from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the
Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a
different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist
hope. Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the
dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of
town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesnt know, tries to make his way
towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are
almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on
the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old
friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on
their city. Then there is Arrow, the pseudonymous name of a gifted
female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden
shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims.
In this beautiful and unforgettable novel, Steven Galloway has taken an
extraordinary, imaginative leap to create a story that speaks
powerfully to the dignity and generosity of the human spirit under
extraordinary duress.
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#6.  |
Cockroach
By Rawi Hage
One of the most highly anticipated novels of the year, Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game.
The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in
Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described "thief"
has just tried but failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a
tree in a local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged
to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naïve therapist. This
sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's violent
childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the
smoky émigré cafés where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen
night-time streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge,
imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the
privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him.
Like De Niro's Game, Cockroach combines an uncompromising
vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders,
and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humour.
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#7
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The Man Game On a recent Vancouver Sunday afternoon, a young man stumbles upon a
secret sport invented more than a century before, at the birth of his
city. Thus begins The Man Game, Lee Henderson’s epic tale of
loved requited and not, that crosses the contemporary and historical in
an extravagant, anarchistic retelling of the early days of a pioneer
town on the edge of the known world.
In 1886, out of the smouldering ashes of the great fire that
destroyed much of the city,Molly Erwagen—former vaudeville
performer—arrives from Toronto with her beloved husband, Samuel, to
start a new life. Meanwhile, Litz and Pisk, two lumberjacks exiled
after the fire, and blamed for having started it, are trying to clear
their names. Before long, they’ve teamed up with Molly to invent a new
sport that will change the course of that fledgling city’s history. |
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#8
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Coventry
By Helen Humphreys
On the night of the Luftwaffe's devastating bombing of Coventry, two
women traverse the city and transform their hearts. Helen Humphreys
draws on history to delve into the lives torn asunder by the German
attack of November 14, 1940. Harriet, a widow from World War I, is atop
Coventry Cathedral, part of the nightly watch, when first the factories
and then the church itself are set on fire. In the ensuing chaos she
bonds with a young man, very much like the husband she lost, who relies
on her to find the way back to his home where he left his mother. On
their journey through a hell of burning shops and collapsed homes,
Harriet awakens to emotions she had long put aside. At home, the
youth's mother awaits his arrival and rethinks the life that has
brought her to this city and her life raising her son alone.
Ultimately, together these two women must face a world as immeasurably
changed as their own selves.
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#9. |
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
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I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of
secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect
readers.January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second
World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book
subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a
man shes never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come
across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb. As Juliet and
her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world
of this man and his friendsand what a wonderfully eccentric world it
is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Societyborn as a
spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking
curfew by the Germans occupying their islandboasts a charming, funny,
deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists,
literature lovers all. \Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with
the societys members, learning about their island, their taste in
books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their
lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and
what she finds will change her forever. Written with warmth and humor
as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word
in all its guises, and of finding connection in the most surprising
ways.
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#10
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Netherland
By Joesph O'Neill
In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a
banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among
the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and
son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country
he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York
subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks
to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck
Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country.
Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part
operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by
immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is
alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck's particular brand of
naivete and chutzpah--by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of
American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith.
"Netherland "gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known
New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition:
the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from
an outsider's vantage point, and the complicated relationship between
the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately,
though, it is the story of one man--of a marriage foundering and
recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and
depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O'Neill's
prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the
struggle for meaning that governs any single life. | |
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