2015 Possibilities

I may have mentioned an old friend now living in Vancouver shared off the top of her head some of her book club's favourites.

The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King’s latest book, is a history of the relationship between North America’s Natives and non-Natives in the centuries since the peoples first met. Perhaps it’s better described as a subversion of history, as King builds a detailed case for how Natives have been, and continue to be, trampled by non-Aboriginal people.

The book is serious but immensely readable, for King (who is part Cherokee) delivers his message in an unconventional manner — with humour and biting, clever wit. Reading one page, my sides were sore with laughter; on the next, tears ran down my cheek.

The Guernsay Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a historical novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows that was published in 2008

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways. Clearly history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization.

Wildly inventive, darkly comic, startlingly poignant — this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best, playing with time and history, telling a story that is breathtaking for both its audacity and its endless satisfactions


 The Secret River is part of a trilogy about early Australia (along with The Lieutenant, published in 2008, and Sarah Thornhill, published in Australia in September 2011 and forthcoming in Europe and North America in February 2012)

Ellen in Pieces

by Caroline Adderson (Author from Vancouver)

Ellen McGinty: sexy, impulsive, loud-mouthed, chock full of regrets. In middle age she sells the house she raised her daughters in, slips off the shell of her old life, and steps out for a first, tentative foray into real contentment-directly into the path of a man twenty years her junior. Her story explodes into multiple points of view. Through the eyes of her lover, Matt, her ex-husband, Larry, her two daughters (one a former addict), her grandson, and a friend who both supports and betrays her, we watch Ellen negotiate the middle years of her tumultuous life as the pieces of who she is finally come together. In its entirety, Ellen in Pieces explores love in its varied forms, the nature of regret (and the possibility of recovery from it), and that greatest human test, mortality