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Anne Stevens' Fall 2006 Picks.
Fiction - Adult
When Alan Bradley was a young boy during the Second World War, he found a well-worn cardboard shoebox hidden beneath the floorboard in his mother’s bedroom. It was not until many years later, when his mother was on her deathbed, that he was able to understand the significance of the scribbled unrelated snippets of Scripture on cigarette packages, soup-can labels, handbills, calendars, paper bags, and pie boxes, any scrap upon which his mother could copy on in her old-fashioned handwriting.
Hockey: A People’s History tells the story of this fast, exciting game from its hotly contested origins, and the surge in its popularity after 1875, when it was first taken inside, through the rise and fall of women’s hockey, the sagas of long-lost leagues, to the present day. The book will also cover amateur hockey and international hockey and will be a lavishly illustrated, invaluable companion book to the CBC Television series, of the same name, which began airing September 17 (10 episodes, 2 hours each).
Charles Thibodeau is a character you will not soon forget. With the death of his mother at age four, dealing with his drunken father and indifferent stepmother, to his friendship with the wonderful Fafard family – Charles shows spunk, warmth and resourcefulness. His story takes place in the working-class, Anglophone district of east-end Montreal in the 1960’s. This book is the first of a trilogy that was a huge hit in French. Luckily there is more to come in spring 2007.
Gerald Woodlore, his wife Vickie and their son Kyle seem to be a pretty normal family on the surface, until Kyle quits school to become a volunteer with the military’s civilian support staff in Afghanistan. He returns home before his tour is over and retreats to his room and no explanation is offered. Trevor Cole manages to create flawed, eccentric, terribly real characters with a humour and wisdom that just astonishes me.
In a dark passageway, an innocent man with red hair is stabbed to death for no apparent reason. So begins the confession, an extraordinary story of betrayal, treachery, delusion, deceit and unrequited love, narrated by Edward Glyver, an obsessive booklover and scholar who possesses talent, brilliance, and an undercover ruthlessness. A gripping, page-turner, full of Dickensian characters, set in Victorian England.
Humphrey and Ailsa met as children. They will both be attending a ceremony where they will meet for the first time in three decades. Both are apprehensive as they review the successes and failures of their public life and their secret history. As they come together they must now see what they will make of their past, and in what spirit they will be able to face the future. This is vintage Drabble as she examines the ways in which place, chance, and time merge to make us what we are now.
Meet the warm, endearing, and delightfully flawed residents of a fictional cul-de-sac in Edmonton’s Garneau neighbourhood just after the scandalous death of a neighbour and the sudden news that their land is about to be repossessed by the university. The disparate residents must come together to work out a strategy to save their homes. This quirky group shows that when regular people put their dreams in motion, anything can happen, namely, political machinations, personal revelations, a public uproar, and unforeseen love.
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