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Alone In The Classroom$29.99 add to cart

In this creepy, three generation novel, Elizabeth Hay tells the story of how a teacher/principal sexually assaults girls he teaches on the Canadian prairies in the 1920's and '30's. We watch in horror as Parley Burns slip slides through the lives of women, destroying them utterly. Hay's glowing prose exposes the secretive nature of women's relationships with their mothers and daughters as, unable to name the horror that slinks among them, they live with austerity and pressure-cooker sexual repression.

From the author of the Giller Prize-winning Late Nights on Air, Alone in the Classroom is a beautifully written novel about a difficult subject.

 

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The Sisters Brothers$22.95 add to cart

Hired killers Eli and Charlie Sisters set out from Oregon City in 1851 for Sacramento, California and the gold fields to complete a contract for their boss. In a fog of alcohol and the stress of coping with a beloved but bumbling horse, Eli and Charlie stagger on, executing anyone who gets in their way. As they win and lose a fortune in gold on more than one occasion, the brothers re-examine their relationship and their purpose in life.

The Sisters Brothers is a gory, brutal yet somehow funny re-telling of the classic western and has just won the 2011 Governor General's Award for Fiction as well as the 2011 Rogers Writer's Trust Award for Fiction. It is being talked about by many booksellers around here and will appeal to readers of any age and of many literary tastes.

A crime writer I am also a crime reader and probably about 80% of my reading is crime novels. I also like to read books set in Canada whenever possible, and sometimes that makes for a difficult search. Canadian crime writers still have the impression that they have to set their books in the U.S. and pretend to be Americans. There are noticeable exceptions, but despite the success of many Canadian - set mystery books on the world stage, setting a crime book in Canada, with Canadian characters and Canadian issues, is seen as taking a risk.

Fortunately there are a number of excellent Canadian writers prepared to take that risk. One of my favourites of the last couple of years is The Weight of Stones (Dundurn Press) by Ottawa's C.B. Forrest. Weight of Stones is a crime novel in that that protagonist is a Toronto police officer and he is on the trail of some 'bad guys' but (like the very best crime novels) it is so much more. The main character, Charlie McKelvey, is consumed by grief and guilt. Grief over the death of his son, and guilt in what he sees as his part in the death because he threw the troubled young man out of the house. Forrest's portrait of McKelvey's anguish, which has destroyed his marriage and is well on the way to destroying his career, is so heart-rending I was surprised when I met Forrest to find, not a drunk ex-cop with a grudge against the world, but a happy young man in a happy marriage. Excellent writing does that.

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A Good Man$32.99 add to cart

A distinctive Saskatchewan voice in Canada and around the world, Saskatoon's Guy Vanderhaeghe broke onto the Canadian literary scene in 1982, winning a Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction for his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Man Descending. His success, international in scope, is particularly noteworthy because he achieved it while remaining in Saskatchewan and writing stories mainly set in Saskatchewan. The key to his success? He tells a good tale. He went on to win another Governor General's Award for his novel The Englishman's Boy (1996), and his most recent novel The Last Crossing (2002) was the 2004 Canada Reads winner.

His new novel A Good Man concludes what could be thought of as a trilogy (after The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing) set in the late nineteenth-century Canadian and American West. Weaving a rich tapestry of history with the personal fortunes of his characters, Vanderhaeghe's A Good Man is the gripping tale of women and men trying to find their places among the shifting forces as a new social order overtakes one of the world's last great frontiers and marks the end of the Wild West.