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Patti Grayson -- Night Table Recommendations

Wednesday, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:05am

I fall in love with most books I am reading. I am steadfastly fickle in this matter. Whittling out recommendations from my night table stacks is a daunting task, so I have chosen a few special books that have contributed to my journey as a writer. These works not only delighted me as a reader, but also informed my own endeavours - made me ask the questions: How did the author craft this offering? How did they evoke emotion? Conjure humanity? How did they convince me of the authenticity of their created worlds? (With apologies to those omitted, including Shakespeare and Atwood).

Lunar Wake by Catherine Hunter (Turnstone Press). This poetry collection is chock-full of wit, brimming with the symbolic and imaginative. At the lunar wake, "...the wolves and astronauts were inconsolable..." I took consolation reading and re-reading this inspired whetstone.

Dickie by Wayne Tefs (House of Anansi). Dickie is the younger brother who witnesses the tragic forces that rend his family apart. Tefs so aptly and edgily depicts both social era and specific emotional turmoil that I had the sense this novel inhaled and exhaled in my grasp.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Knopf Canada). This book was a fortuitous pluck-from-the-shelf pick. A captivating read ensued. The work is vivid, yet subtle, and exhibits a storytelling prowess that crystallizes life's minor events into memorable literary gemstones.

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group). From the opening paragraphs describing a young boy's mysterious murder, Tartt invited me to surrender my hand and follow her wherever she chose to lead me. (Ditto for her first novel, The Secret History).

Lottery by Patricia Wood (Berkley Publishing). I would like to believe this book appealed to me because a thematic struggle between good and evil is reflected in its folds; but perhaps I just find cheering for the underdog to be irresistible and therapeutic.

Blue Sunflower Startle by Yasmin Ladha (Broadview Press). A poetic feast of a novel - the language so rich and laden, I gained weight reading it. The story is steeped in a series of domestic realms, while conveying an array of political, religious and cultural insights.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group). In this book, Russo exhibits a masterful control over the ebb and flow of dramatic tension. He conducted me through the midst of beguiling characters and oh-so-familiar situations to the brink of the unbearable.

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Patti Grayson has worked as an actor, puppeteer, advertising copywriter and school librarian. Her first collection of short stories Core Samples (Turnstone, 2004) garnered nominations for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book. Her novel Autumn, One Spring was featured as a Breakfast Television Book Club choice shortly after it was launched at McNally Robinson this past October. She lives in St. Andrews, Manitoba.

Categories: Reviews, Discussions, Authors, Night Table Recommendations

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Autumn, One Spring

- Patti Grayson

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Autumn Greene returns to her hometown after a six-year absence, uninvited to her sister Christine’s wedding, the daughter she conceived in a one-time encounter with her sister’s ex-fiancé in tow. Once burned, twice angry, Christine does all she can to make Autumn unwelcome, assuming another wedding disaster. A harbinger of truth, Autumn reveals all of Christine’s secrets and brings about a near-nuclear explosion of emotion and confusion among the family and wedding party. In the fallout of this strangest of romances, forgiveness emerges as the biggest challenge.Autumn, One Spring is a humour-infused drama that takes truthfulness in relationships seriously. Autumn constantly berates herself for making people unhappy when she opens her big mouth, but can’t stop herself from stating frankly all she sees, hears, and thinks.Grayson’s Autumn is a young woman who has transformed from a love poem-writing teenager with a crush on her high-school English teacher, Mr. Ashton, to a world-weary working single mom. Returning to her hometown brings her face to face with both Gabriel Ashton and the father of her child, forcing her to open doors to new life possibilities.Autumn’s well-developed character touches a chord in anyone who has ever experienced love’s cruel injustice, and the ever-spiralling plot keeps her readers glued to the page to see what the final outcome will be.

Core Samples

- Patti Grayson

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From the publisher:

Patti Grayson’s debut collection of short fiction takes as its subject matter those moments in our lives when everything suddenly feels foreign, when a turn of heart takes us in the blink of an eye to a new place that looks familiar, and is anything but.

A daughter discovers her divorced father’s extensive history of infidelity on the day he is to get remarried; a border guard chooses duty over family, to his regret; a middle-aged woman takes revenge on the best friend she suspects is sleeping with her husband the only way she knows how; and a woman suffers a horrible car crash that leaves her speechless, replacing her ability to talk with the sounds of a full symphonic orchestra.

Grayson’s stories are subtle and understated, hilarious and heartbreaking. In Core Samples her characters are forced to face the absurdity of love, the devastation of infidelity, and the imprisonment of self-doubt. They travel the highway between hearts and minds that at times seems startlingly short and at others impossibly long. And they feel the road with every inch of their being, some potholes eliciting laughter, and some pain, but every one shaking them to the core.

Lunar Wake

- Catherine Hunter

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Lunar Wake ebbs and flows like an ocean tide, bringing with it madness, romance, obsession, egoism: the ­uncontrollable forces that control our lives, reflecting the poet's own ambivalence about the moon as a symbol and its lyric tradition."Catherine Hunter's is a full, assured and original voice. With its complex, driving rhythms, its clarity, playfulness, imaginative breadth and emotional range, it's a voice full of surprises."--George Amabile

Black Swan Green

- David Mitchell

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From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new.

Black Swan tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran Lps, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons. Not to mention vicious bullying.

Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date.

The Little Friend

- Donna Tartt

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The Little Friend seems destined to become a special kind of classic. . . . It grips you like a fairy tale, but denies you the consoling assurance that it’s all just make-believe.” —The New York Times Book Review

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of The Little Friend, he long-anticipated and widely praised bestseller by Donna Tartt, author of the critically acclaimed The Secret History.

The Secret History

- Donna Tartt

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Truly deserving of the accolade a modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a remarkable achievement—both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.

Lottery

- Patricia Wood

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Money isn't the same as treasure, and IQ isn't the same as smarts--An uplifting and joyous new novel hailed by Jacqueline Mitchard as "solid gold."

Perry L. Crandall knows what it's like to be an outsider. With an IQ of 76, he's an easy mark. Before his grandmother died, she armed Perry well with what he'd need to know: the importance of words and writing things down, and how to play the lottery. Most important, she taught him whom to trust-a crucial lesson for Perry when he wins the multimillion-dollar jackpot. As his family descends, moving in on his fortune, his fate, and his few true friends, he has a lesson for them: never, ever underestimate Perry Crandall.

Blue Sunflower Startle

- Yasmin Ladha

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A home harbours secrets. Father has cancer. He is dying. Not a word.

Mother tells me to take care of my little brother.

In the early 1960s, a young girl and her brother move to their grandparents' flourmill in Dodoma in newly-independent Tanzania. Her grandfather bellows his love for East Africa, where he and other Indian merchants have thrived. But the ground is shifting. President Nyerere is calling for the widespread nationalization of property. The hum of the mill has quieted. The young girl prays at the jamatkhana (Give me back my father) and spends evenings at the cinema watching cowboy films--grief and grievances, if only momentarily, disappear.

Hush, not a word.

Years later, the girl and her family immigrate to Calgary, Alberta and she begins a love affair with the prairies. Wary that her grandfather's passion for his country consumed him, she is unwilling to settle for geographical monogamy. She travels to Chonju, South Korea to work as a language teacher, and Delhi, India for trysts with her Kashmiri lover. Frequently, she is startled by the appearance of things that remind her of the prairies, but show up in other countries. She aches for a home that beckons her return: the Canadian West, the hero that pulls a U-turn for its beloved.

Would you come for her, all ribby hair, or slicing the air like a boomerang, hollering at God? Would you strike a wild deal with Him, do anything to get her back?

Yasmin Ladha offers readers an exquisite exploration of the ways in which one can love a country. Written in unusual, intoxicating, and poetic prose, Blue Sunflower Startle is a modern day Romance for frequent travellers and nomadic spirits.

Empire Falls

- Richard Russo

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER o PULITZER PRIZE WINNER o The bestselling author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace.

"Rich, humorous ... Mr. Russo's most seductive book thus far." --The New York Times

Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo.

Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it's the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town-and seems to believe that "everything" includes Miles himself.

Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.