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Lost Memory of Skin$32.00 add to cart

The five finalists for the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America's largest peer-juried prize for fiction, have been announced. They are:

Russell Banks for Lost Memory of Skin
Don DeLillo for The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
Anita Desai for The Artist of Disappearance
Steven Millhauser for We Others: New and Selected Stories
Julie Otsuka for The Buddha in the Attic

We're long-time fans of Russell Banks and Don Delillo. Julie Otsuka was new to us this year but The Buddha in the Attic has already seen strong sales.

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Congratulations to the nominees of the 2011 Nebula Awards, presented annually by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The Nebulas are voted on, and presented by, active members of the SFWA. Montreal's Jo Walton is the sole Canadian among this year's novel nominees.

• Among Others, Jo Walton
• Embassytown, China Miéville
• Firebird, Jack McDevitt
• God's War, Kameron Hurley
• Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine
• The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin

A complete list of nominees may be found here.

 

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Pure$24.99 add to cart

We first became aware of Andrew Miller when he won the Impac Dublin Award for his novel Ingenious Pain. Set at the beginning of the Enlightenment, that novel made the rounds of MR booksellers amid much conversation and enthusiasm. So it came as no surprise to us when Miller was awarded this year's Costa Book Award in the UK for his newest novel Pure. Here Miller goes back to the Enlightenment, deep in the heart of Paris, where its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it.

At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.

Take a chance on Miller. You won't be disappointed.

 

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Something Fierce$21.00 add to cart

On the final day of the Canada Reads: True Stories debates Carmen Aguirre's darkly comic memoir Something Fierce knocked off Ken Dryden's lauded hockey book, The Game. This year marked the first time Canada Reads offered non-fiction.

This dramatic, darkly funny narrative, which covers the decade from 1979 to 1989, takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictatorship-run Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's Chile. Writing with passion and deep personal insight, Carmen Aguirre captures her constant struggle to reconcile her commitment to the resistance movement with the desires of her youth and her budding sexuality. Something Fierce is a gripping story of love, war and resistance and a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life.